An excellent report on Channel 4 which highlights the problem of both sickness and redundancy costs within the public sector.
Here are some of the key extracts.
"Many of them point to genuine sickness problems – though why the bad weather in Aberdeen and North Wales should affect workers there disproportionately compared to the rest of us (who by the way also had to endure a pretty miserable winter last year) is unclear. It's a reason for some absence, for sure, but for such high numbers?
It's more likely that there is, as the unions report, a big element of stress. Particularly in Aberdeen's case, where council workers have endured years of cost cutting, restructuring and turmoil.
After speaking to the chief executive there, Sue Bruce, you were at least left with the impression she was a woman who was in charge, understood the problem and was working on ways of tackling it. The same can not be said for Conwy in North Wales, however, where I was left with the distinct feeling that officials didn't really seem to have a grip on what the sickness absence numbers were, let alone how to bring them down.
Sickness costs
The problem for Ms Bruce, and others like her, is that with the cuts looming – they will have a third less money to spend from central Government - council workers will be even more stressed and that could, if unmanaged, lead to higher rates of absenteeism. And that costs.
In Aberdeen's case, as much as £5m is already wasted each year paying workers to be off sick and paying agency staff to replace them. With £127m of "savings" to be found, Aberdeen can't afford for that bill to get any higher.
And speaking of savings, we all know the biggest way of saving money is to cut staff. And here's where our research shows councils have another big problem.
Redundancy
Some 30,000 council employees have been laid off since 2007, but it's a saving that has come with its own price – almost half a billion pounds, in fact.
The Local Government Association says that town halls have put cash into reserves to pay for this outlay. But chief executive John Ransford told me he is worried that some small councils won't be able to make the level of redundancies demanded of them.
Some will be forced to ask the government for special dispensation to effectively borrow against their capital budgets. And these aren't small sums we're talking. With estimates of job losses at anything up to and above 100,000 staff, the overall bill could be as high as £1bn, or more.
It's true that the redundancies will be spread out over a number of years, but given the extent of the cuts, it seems inevitable that services will have to drastically cut to help pay for the layoffs.
At a time when central government's turning to a crack team of experts including Philip Green for help on how to make its own cuts, councils are being cast adrift – receiving less money but a lot more freedom on how to spend it. "
Here are some key observations.
1 One has to be careful when one refers to figures. Making reference to an overall bill as high of £1bn, you need specific and credible data to back this up.
2 It is quite clear that with the change management in the public sector, sickness is going to go up. Mediation is going to have to be embedded within organisations.
3. Redundancy costs are significant. Increasingly organisations will reduce the public sector packages or search for performance management for dealing with staff.
Justin Patten, Mediator