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13,434 years lost
on sick leave in 2002. And
that's just the civil
service... Last week the private
sector released figures
showing that one in four
employees will take a 'sickie'
in January. If you think that
is bad, look at what is going
on in the public sector,
writes Adam Lusher It's fair to say that his words were laced with a certain element of despair. "I just look at the sickness monitoring report when it comes out and I cry," said Stephen Greenhalgh, the leader of the Conservatives at the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. "This is about our taxes and so much of them are being wasted. "Of course absenteeism is a problem, a phenomenal problem. I have been involved in one case where a council employee has been working for 12 years and clocked up five years off sick. "On my reading of the figures, we have a council of 6,223 employees averaging 8.8 days off sick. That adds up to 273 years of lost work this year. Those are huge losses, and they are costing the taxpayers while the people we help get less than they deserve. "Of course there are examples of sickies being taken. There's no doubt about it." Mr Greenhalgh's account is one side of "the sickie" story. The other is the call made to the office, when, by summoning all our courage and thespian talents, and speaking in the suffering tones of the genuinely ill, we secure ourselves a pleasurable day off. A study by Portfolio Payroll and Peninsula, the Manchester-based employment law firm, found that out of nearly 1,000 employees, 82 per cent had at some time called in feigning sickness simply to have a day off. Nearly all of us have done it then, at least once anyway. If a second survey is to be believed, many of us are about to do it again. January is the month of the sickie, according to a study conducted for the Consumer Health Information Centre and the charity Developing Patients Partnerships. The study found that, with the pleasurable glow from the Christmas holiday fading fast, 13 per cent of us were planning to take a day off when we were not really ill this month. Among 16- to 24-year-olds the figure was 34 per cent, more than one in three. There was some talk of the "January blues", and from employers, the suggestion that we should be questioning how crucial mid-week sporting contests are able to be played in front of packed stadiums. But last week's surveys highlighted a rather more vexing issue: the massive price we are all paying when the less-than-genuine sick stay away from their desks. Staff absence, we were told by the CBI, cost the UK economy £11.6 billion a year. In the private sector, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the average employee took seven days off sick every year. That, though, was only the private sector. In the public sector things were significantly less healthy, in every sense of the word. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimated that the average public sector employee was three days "less healthy" than his public sector counterpart, taking an annual 10.6 days off. A survey published by the Government last month revealed that in 2002, sickness absence in the Civil Service cost the taxpayer £370 million. It totalled 4,903,705 days: 13,434 years. The average civil servant was taking an annual 9.8 days off sick. This still left some way to go before the Government could think about achieving its five-year target set in 1998 of a 30 per cent reduction in Civil Service sickness absence to 7.2 days. It was not long before the differences between public and private sector were pointed out, especially with the Opposition on a strident offensive against waste and red tape in Britain's expanding bureaucracy. "The Government has set the targets and as always it has failed to meet them," said David Willetts, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary last week. "I don't believe that people in the public sector are systematically sicker than people in the private sector, so it must be bad management. It is another example of waste and inefficiency that has to be tackled." Mr Greenhalgh was considerably blunter. Through gritted teeth, he recalled the throwaway remarks of some of his staff at the west London medical services company that he runs. "They've applied to work at councils and they are quite categoric about why: an easy life, job security and easy money." Some public servants were indignant at such suggestions. They pointed to the stress involved in working in frontline services such as housing benefit offices where staff may find themselves dealing with angry and aggressive tenants nearly every day. This, they suggested, helped explain why the number of employees in all sectors claiming they are prevented from working by psychological problems has risen from 445,000 in 1995 to 846,000 in 2003. Such explanations, though, do invite the complaints of many GPs that they often have nothing but the patient's word to go on when they sign them off for "stress". The British Medical Association wants GPs to be freed of the task of writing sick notes. Others with experience of the public sector, meanwhile, seemed to present a different view of their working life. One former civil servant, for example (who wished to remain nameless), had an interesting explanation for why his conscience was clear. "The honest response," he sighed, politely wishing that he could be more helpful, "is that there wasn't really any abuse in my department. "The only times I was ever off sick were when I was hung over. I would just say I had the flu or a cold." Which wasn't really dishonest, you understand. "Well, you are still ill aren't you? You have poisoned yourself. The fact that it's self-inflicted is neither here nor there. "No one ever wanted any detail. If you had turned round and told them you were hung over, they would never have passed that on. They would have just told their own team leader you had a cold." The 31-year-old worked as a higher executive officer on £20,000 a year, in a department which, according to the latest statistics, now has a slightly lower than average Civil Service sickness rate. What had to be realised, he said, was that the Civil Service was not like the nasty world of business. "You get the odd macho enclave like the Cabinet Office, but generally people don't like doing the things that come easily to the private sector. "It's not in their nature. The person who goes into the Civil Service is not a sacker. They are intellectuals who like a quiet life. People are scared of being hated in the Civil Service. "The senior managers were introducing more and more measures like interviews after you returned to work, but the junior managers who actually had to implement the policy disliked doing so because they felt so uncomfortable. It was generally ignored. "Even if you were really bad you would be given so many chances before you encountered any real discipline. To fire anybody would be against the whole ethos." Mr Greenhalgh, with his view of the public sector, couldn't quite see it that way. "The absenteeism is very bad among blue-collar workers in social services, involved in things like home care. It's also bad among school cleaners, school catering staff, the people providing street cleaning and rubbish removal. "It's not just the lost productivity and sick pay. "You also have to cover with agency staff who have no loyalty and cost a lot more." The irony - perhaps the alarming irony - is that the statistics would suggest that Hammersmith and Fulham is actually one of the better performing London boroughs when it came to staff absenteeism. In the words of a Hammersmith and Fulham spokesman: "We are not perfect, but we are not by any means the worst." The latest figures from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister actually suggest that Hammersmith and Fulham has the ninth best absentee record of 32 London authorities for which statistics are available. Figures submitted by the Labour-controlled council for the financial year 2002-2003 show that the average Hammersmith and Fulham employee was taking 8.8 sick days a year compared with 13.9 in Greenwich. "The previous year it was running at 9.7 days," said the borough spokesman. "Yes, we are slightly over the target set by the Government, which was to reduce absence to 7.8 days by April 2003, but it is coming down." Measures such as absence management workshops for departmental directors had been introduced, he said. It was inaccurate, he added, to attribute the £1.6 million overspend - so far - for the financial year 2003-4 on staff absence. But one simple exercise brings the issue into sharp relief. The council took a random week for the basis of a few calculations: May 21 to May 27, 2001. In that single week, the officers calculated that the council had lost 669 days' work through sickness absence. The total cost to the council tax payer in sick pay, agency cover and other expenses? £65,427. For one week. Perhaps Mr Greenhalgh should take comfort from the fact that he does not live in Greenwich. Oh, and he will also be pleased to hear that our former civil servant works through his hangovers now instead of claiming sick pay for them. He's moved to the private sector. Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright |