Jeremy Corbyn’s aim to introduce a four-day working week would cost the taxpayer at least £17 billion a year because of the impact on the public sector wage bill, a new analysis has shown.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, told the Labour conference in September that the party would reduce average full-time hours to 32 a week within a decade “with no loss of pay”. People should “work to live, not live to work”, he said.
Research by the Centre for Policy Studies, a centre-right think tank, has found that reducing the hours of public sector employees, including doctors, nurses, teachers, firefighters and police officers, would impose a significant extra burden on the Treasury because the workforce would have to expand.
“At the very
