A raft of “risks” have been found across a council’s HR and organisational development function.

Details on the nature of these “serious” issues were not given in an officer report, which is due to go before Southampton City Council’s governance committee on Monday, June 2.

The paper by director of people and organisational culture Kerry Eldridge said a “deep dive diagnostic” took place across HR and organisational development in February.

“As a result of this activity, 18 risk areas leading to priority improvement activity was (sic) identified as requiring immediate mitigation,” Ms Eldridge’s report said.

“These risks were further investigated and due to the nature and extent of the serious nature, a mitigation plan was proposed and put into place with immediate effect and weekly reporting.”

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The committee report goes on to focus on staff sickness, vacancy levels and agency spend, HR advisory service, the learning and development offer, and HR processes and new ways of working.

For the seven months from August 2024 to February 2025, Southampton City Council spent £5,307,427 on agency workers.

While the majority of temporary staffing spend was through the council’s neutral vendor Comensura, the early part of 2025 showed a trend to more suppliers outside of Comensura being used, the report said.

Meanwhile, the paper said sickness days per employee fell slightly for the final three months of 2024/25 compared to the previous quarter but the cost of sickness remained high at just shy of £2.68million.

The report said a new interim employee relations and wellbeing manager had been appointed to oversee and support this area.

“Within her first week she has supported the launch of an employee relations case tracker and consolidated the original 336 absence cases into 99,” the paper added.

The local authority is aiming to have sickness levels below the sector average of eight days per employee. The latest Southampton City Council figure was 9.17 days.

Ms Eldridge’s report said work on this issue would involve a variety of initiatives, including improved and appropriate mental health support, training and pro-active intervention.

Long term sickness – defined as a continuous period of absence exceeding 20 days – made up 54 per cent of the local authority’s overall absence for the year.

The biggest causes of long-term sickness by a significant margin were musculoskeletal- and psychological-related absences.

On the latter category, the highest number of days lost over the past 12 months was due to stress and anxiety followed by depression.

The committee report said new approaches to support health and wellbeing were being developed, with discussions taking place with local charities and organisations across the city to develop a partnership pilot scheme for new ways of working to support a reduction of sickness absence.

The directorates with the most prevalent staff sickness were resident services and community wellbeing, with rates of 11.9 days and 11.6 days, respectively, per full-time equivalent post.