The public sector is losing £4 billion per year or more through staff sick days - equivalent to an extra 1 pence on income tax and another 1 pence on fuel duty, with millions left over - research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel has shown.

If the government cut the high sick rates among public service workers to the same levels as their private sector colleagues, it would save about £1 billion - enough to abolish the air passenger levy and cut the price of air travel.

Government Response: Cabinet Office

(The Cabinet Office is commenting on the civil service, which accounts for 10 per cent of the public sector as a whole and a fraction of those included in the report by CIPD.)

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "Individual departments, most of which are large employers, are committed to reducing sickness absence. The CIPD report 2004 recognises that absence rates are generally higher the larger the organisation. The civil service has ensured that its own absence data is now more accurate than before. We can now provide a baseline for establishing a more consistent and rigorous method for monitoring and in doing so improving this absence within departments."

Forum Response: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

Report author Ben Willmott commented: "A large part of managing stress is about good people management. It is about providing employees with well-defined jobs roles, challenging but realistic targets and the support, training and recognition to help them achieve these targets. Although it is worrying to see stress-related absence on the increase it is encouraging that employers are taking action to address this.

"Our research has shown that absence management has become a key concern for employers as absence levels and costs rise.  It is encouraging therefore to see personnel professionals working more closely with their line managers and outside professionals such as occupational health specialists to address the main causes of absence.
 
"UK organisations could do more to reduce absence levels by monitoring absence more closely. Only 46 per cent of UK employers monitor its cost and just 49 per cent of employers set targets for reducing absence."

Forum Response: Institute of Directors

Geraint Day, health policy adviser at the Institute of Directors, said: "These differences between the public and private sector are nothing new. Whichever sector, absence from work can not only cause problems for the organisation as a whole but also for users of services and for colleagues who cover for absent colleagues. There is a need to apply sensible ways to improve the situation. In extreme cases people who disappear from the workforce not only cause problems for organisations and users. It is a fact that, generally speaking, long-term absence that leads to permanent absence is actually bad for the person's state of health across a wide range of health measures. So it is important to try to tackle this.
 
"In the case of public services it is particularly important as many millions of users may depend on these services. Within the public sector it has sometimes been the case that it has appeared more culturally acceptable to have higher rates of absence from work. To be sure, there have been issues around morale and management. Yet new ways of approaching many of these problems now need to be thought about and applied.
 
"Good practices need to be learned about and applied. That is one reason that the Institute of Directors has been in dialogue with organisations such as insurers and employers, as well as government ministries such as the Department for Work and Pensions. The solutions will not necessarily be easy, but they will include a range of management initiatives such as employers gaining a better idea of what is going on in their own organisation and estimating the costs and benefits of so doing."