Today the front page of The Times reports that the Labour Party’s plans to introduce a four day working week will cost taxpayers £17 billion.
The figure is based on a report from the Centre for Policy Studies, which attempts to quantify the impact of reducing average full time hours to 32 hours with no loss of pay on the public sector wage bill.
On the face of it, this sounds plausible. After all, if everyone works less, surely more people will need to be employed to maintain services, which will push the wage bill up?
