7. Plaid Cymru Debate: A four-day working week

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:19 pm on 22 September 2021.

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Photo of Mabon ap Gwynfor Mabon ap Gwynfor Plaid Cymru 5:19, 22 September 2021

(Translated)

I will, thank you. I don't know whether Joel listened to the constitutional debate yesterday, where we heard about legislation from the Roman empire, about Hywel Dda, about Iorwerth and other examples in history. But I want to start by turning to history to show that it's possible to get to grips with major social challenges, by improving the quality of life of people by decreasing working hours.

Consider the growth in our national sports—football, cricket, rugby—or our seaside towns, their growth, or the spa towns, expanding people's horizons with train travel and the social development up to the 1930s, when the weekend as we know it today was introduced. These benefits came as a result of the campaign to decrease working hours at that time. Today, of course, it's other crises that face our society, none greater than the climate crisis. Regardless of the list that Gareth set out, it's the climate crisis that faces our planet—that's the major challenge, and this campaign to decrease working hours could play a part in the solution.

How? Well, assessments show that shifting to a four-day working week without the loss of pay can decrease the carbon footprint of the United Kingdom by 127 million tonnes a year by 2025, which is a decrease of over 21 per cent in our carbon emissions. Earlier this year, Platfform released a report on the environmental benefits of a shorter working week, which demonstrated a decrease in the use of electricity because employees were working away from the intensive use of electricity in the centralised offices. Joel referred to Utah—nobody says that this will be perfect; there will be issues that arise, and that's why we refer to a pilot—but in Utah the experiments there led to energy savings, significant savings.

Last year, Autonomy published a report that reviewed data from energy usage in households in the United Kingdom during working days as compared to weekends. The report came to the conclusion that a three-day weekend would decrease carbon emissions by 117,000 tonnes a week. Now, the past year has been exceptional in several ways, but we've seen working patterns stabilising, with roads becoming busier and heavy traffic during peak hours, once again. Three quarters of the workforce in our rural areas are dependent on transport or travel to work in a private car. The car dominates towns and villages, with almost 70 per cent using this form of transport, so it stands to reason that a shorter working week would have an impact on this, too.

Work by the University of Reading demonstrates that shorter weeks lead to fewer journeys in private cars. They estimate that over half a billion miles fewer would be travelled every week, which of course means fewer emissions and fewer travel costs. This report by the University of Reading goes further, and suggests that good causes such as charities that need volunteers would benefit, as Sioned mentioned earlier, and that family well-being would benefit, because people say that they would spend more time at home with their families. A four-day working week would release more time—[Interruption.] Of course.