SNP conference votes for four-day week trial across Scottish public sector

The SNP’s autumn conference voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to commit the Scottish government to a two-year four-day week pilot covering at least 5,000 public sector workers, after a debate in which the finance secretary urged delegates not to “write a cheque the budget cannot cash”.

The motion, brought by the party’s trade union group, passed by 1,106 votes to 412. It calls for the pilot to begin by April 2027 across three councils, two health board back-office functions and at least one national agency, with staff keeping full pay for a 32-hour week. A smaller trial involving 140 staff at the Scottish Government’s own Edinburgh headquarters concluded in 2025 and reported no fall in output.

“We ran the experiment and it worked. Now we are being told that it worked too well to repeat,” said Morag Cuthbertson, a social worker from Dundee who moved the motion. “Public services in Scotland cannot recruit. We are competing with the private sector on a salary we cannot match. We can compete on time.”

The finance secretary, speaking against the motion from the platform in an unusual intervention, said the earlier trial had involved “desk-based staff with no shift patterns” and that extending it to councils would require either longer days or more staff. “A four-day week in a care home is a five-day week for somebody else,” she said. “I am not against this. I am against pretending it is free.”

Council leaders were quick to respond. The body representing Scottish local authorities said it had “not been consulted and will not be rushed”, and pointed out that councils were already seeking to cut 3,400 posts across the country in the next financial year. One Highland councillor said the party had “voted to spend our money on our staff without asking either of us”.

The vote is not binding on ministers, but conference decisions carry weight in the run-up to the Holyrood election. The four-day week has become a totemic issue on the party’s left, which argues it is a visible, low-cost way to demonstrate what a Scottish government can do differently from Westminster.

Dr Fergus Lennox, who studies working patterns at the University of Strathclyde, said the evidence from private sector trials was “encouraging but narrow”. “Marketing agencies and software firms can do this. A refuse collection round or a planning department has not been tested anywhere at scale,” he said. “Scotland would be the first. That is either the point or the problem, depending on who you ask.”

The conference also backed motions on rural housing and on a Scottish digital identity scheme. The leadership’s own motion on the party’s route to independence passed without a card vote.