Cardiff council has fired 77 of its workers after a performance report by its chief executive revealed the average time spent off ill per employee was two weeks a year.
The council, which is the largest in Wales, has seen its sickness levels rise to what the council leader has called “frightening levels” this year, particularly in the run up to July, with workers in the health and environmental departments now forecast to take up to 17 days – or three weeks – off due to ill health by the end of the financial year, closely followed by the children’s department where staff are expected to be absent for 15.4 days on average.
In total, the council will experience sickness levels of just over 10 days up to April 2015 compared to the Office of National Statistics average of 4.4 days. This means around 53,000 working days will be lost by the council to staff sickness over a three month period.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recently published a report on the state of the nation’s workers’ health, which found the main reasons people took time off work are stress, anxiety and musculoskeletal disorders. These account for 20 million working days and £8.6 billion lost revenue every year to the British economy. It also revealed 1.2 million United Kingdom workers are currently off work due to a work-related illness.
The report also highlighted professional workplaces, such as offices, were likely to experience the highest levels of work-related staff illnesses while manual work environments have the greatest number of work-related accidents. Those over 45 are also more likely to have a prolonged absence for work-related illness, while health, social care and educational workers were singled out for their high levels of stress-based absences. There were 244,000 cases of work-related stress absences in 2012 alone.
In 2012, Cardiff Council introduced a system where workers would not receive any pay for the first three days they were off sick in an effort to tackle short-term absence. Its current sickness figures do not say what the cause of the sickness are, and whether they are work-related. The sackings for absence took place between June 2013 and July 2014 and increased by 40% on figures for the previous year.
However, sickness levels in general at the council have decreased overall from 11.73 days in 2012/2013 to 9.98 days in 2013/2014 but some individual departments have increased, and the prediction for 2014/2015 may well rise back up to just over 10.1 days based on current figures.
The HSE’s report concluded 1.2 million workers currently have a work-related illness and are off long-term because of it, 28.2 million working days were lost due to workplace illness or injury in 2012, and £14.2 billion was taken out of the workplace because of illness or injury.