It’s local election day for most of the country – though not in South Cambridgeshire. The Lib Dem led District Council there has been in the news a lot this week but not for the right reasons. Council bosses there have just hailed the ‘overwhelmingly positive’ results of their four-day working week trial and are now set to extend it for a further twelve months. Nice life for some eh?
The pilot scheme was launched in January and gives staff the chance to take either Mondays or Fridays off on the assumption that they will work ‘more productively for the remaining days.’ And this week the Daily Mail revealed that Liz Watts, the chief executive, has been working on a PhD thesis about the effects of a four-day working week, and is now facing calls to step down over a potential conflict of interest.
Now Steerpike has found out just how much Watts is earning for all of this: a whopping six-figure sum. She was paid between £130,000 and £135,000 in 2021/22, the last year for which figures are available. South Cambridgeshire was one of just 47 local authorities to not publish its 2021/22 annual accounts, with the council only publishing draft accounts for the previous year on its website, rather than the full audited accounts required. Their senior salaries were published separately.
Elliot Keck, investigations campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance told Mr S that ‘a council that can’t even publish its accounts on time is the last place to consider cutting hours without any impact on pay.’ If Watts is now working 20 per cent less, will her pay be cut accordingly?
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