Academics from the University of Cambridge have been accused of allowing South Cambs District Council to tweak data, casting their four-day work week pilot scheme in a more favourable light.
A story broken in the Daily Mail showed that the university's Bennett Institute for Public Policy allowed the council to make changes to the independent report.
Commenting on the evidence, South Cambs MP Anthony Browne said: "It is totally misleading for the local Liberal Democrats to say that their four-day working week experiment is supported by an independent report from Cambridge University, when they were secretly editing the report to make it more positive.
"The Liberal Democrats need to be honest with voters and tell us which bits of the report they deleted to ensure that it would be less embarrassing for them.
"It is more evidence that the four-day working week at the South Cambs District Council is an experiment that has resulted in falling service standards and rising costs that is driven by ideology not reality.
"The long-suffering residents had no vote on being turned into ideological guinea pigs - the Lib Dems kept their plans hidden at the last election - but have to put up the consequences.
"The Liberal Democrats are desperately trying to justify their failed experiment by misleading voters and torturing the data, but they have been found out.
"It is time for them to ditch the ideology and stop the experiment, as the Government has demanded."
However a spokesperson for the Bennett Institute clarified that the report was independent, and that the changes were minor and part of a normal process.
The spokesperson said: "The Bennett Institute’s evaluation of South Cambridgeshire District Council’s metrics during the pilot period was independent. It was not commissioned by SCDC.
"There was a normal process of discussion and minor changes to the draft report and press release, correctly described in the email correspondence as 'tweaks'.
"The Institute has not taken any stance on the pilot scheme."
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A spokesperson for South Cambs District Council added: "The Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge independently reviewed the council’s data from the trial, to ensure it was analysed without any risk of bias.
"This is a trial, but we have already seen strong independently assessed evidence which showed that performance was maintained, and in some cases improved, in the first three months."
The council's four-day working week trial started in January, and was intended to last three months.
At a cabinet meeting in May, cabinet members agreed to extend the trial for 12 months on the basis of the Bennett Institute's report.
According to the report, nine out of the 16 areas monitored showed "substantial improvement" when comparing the trial period from January to March to the same period in 2022.
The remaining seven areas either showed a similar performance level or a slight decline.
Four-day weeks aim to encourage staff to 'work smarter' and be more productive, with the benefit of having extra time off.
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