Beyond Westminster: How the Four‐Day Working Week Reached the UK Public Sector

The United Kingdom's emergence as a public sector pioneer in the four‐day working week debate presents a striking paradox. A post‐Thatcher liberal market economy hostile to statutory working‐time reform might be expected to resist government‐sponsored working‐time reduction in the public sector. Yet the UK hosted the largest coordinated private sector trial in the world and some of the most ambitious public sector experiments in Europe. Drawing on thirteen elite interviews with key policy actors and forty‐six primary documents, this article traces the policy process from the first think tank proposal in 2010 to the consolidation of public sector trials by 2024 in Scotland and England. It argues that three factors explain the paradox: a progressive think tank ecosystem that popularised the idea, subnational governance structures that opened up alternative venues for the policy and trade union mobilisation concentrated in the public sector. Together they produced an outcome that Westminster explicitly rejected.