A seven-figure sum for the annual cost of staff sickness at Southampton City Council did not include the amount spent on covering absence where required.

Members of the governance committee received a quarterly HR data report which said the “overall cost” of staff sickness was £2.6million per year.

This was labelled “a lot of money” by the committee’s deputy chair, who asked for more information from officers at a meeting on Monday, June 2.

Cllr Rebecca McCreanor said: “Does that include temporary staff having cover those people that are sick or is it just that’s what we have to pay people because they are ill?”

Director of people and culture Kerry Eldridge, who wrote the report, said: “That’s purely on the absence alone.

“That isn’t on the cover of any of those services that need for service reasons those posts covering whilst the person is absent.”

Labour member Cllr McCreanor replied: “So there will be an additional cost to cover? Wow.”

The report said staff sickness rates had shown a small downward trend in the final quarter of 2023/24, but remained above the eight-day sector at 9.17 days per employee.

Cllr Rob Harwood challenged the use of the sector average as a benchmark.

“We are judging ourselves against the sector average and I don’t think we should,” Conservative member Cllr Harwood said.

“I think we should be judging ourselves on industry best practice.

“The public sector is notoriously bad for sickness percentages, so if we were equal to the sector average it doesn’t mean we are particularly good.”

He asked for the next version of the report to include both the industry and sector average, as well as statistics on the number of dismissals that have taken place.

Labour councillor Sue Blatchford asked officers to include data trends throughout all areas of the report to allow comparisons to be made more easily with previous figures.

On staff absence, the committee heard there was not a trend in day of the week.

The rate of absence was higher in the winter months than in the summer, which was to be expected, Ms Eldridge said.

She added: “We know that management intervention will have a positive impact on reducing sickness absence and the keeping in touch with people and regular contact is one of the key drivers to us implementing the new leadership development programme.”

Governance committee chair and Labour member Cllr Jacqui Rayment asked for data to be included on the number of consultants the council was using.

Ms Eldridge said it would be possible to include this information, as well as details on dismissals, the industry average absence rate and data trends.

Cllr Rayment said: “For members a much more informative report, touched a lot of areas that we’d asked a number of questions on.”