Chief executive Monica Fogarty has vowed to take action on Warwickshire County Council's rising staff absence rates, insisting: "We can't just accept this level any longer."

Ms Fogarty is a regular presence at meetings of cabinet – the panel of councillors that takes political decisions – but rarely addresses them with the elected officials in charge of services usually taking the lead. 

Thursday's gathering saw the council's latest performance figures discussed with overall staff absence going up again, remaining over not only target levels but the tolerance granted. 

The numbers showed that the average number of sick days per year taken by a full-time member of staff was 10.73 at the end of December 2024, up from 10.38 the previous quarter and 10.24 the quarter before that. It stood at 9.86 at the end of the last financial year and 9.16 a year and a half ago. The council's target is eight per year.

There are variances between departments but councillors were particularly worried by the continued increase in absence related to stress and mental health, the biggest single cause. 

The council's performance report read: "Targeted activity continues to be focused on teams with particularly high levels of stress and mental health absence and longer-term absences.

"The focus will now move to better understanding the root cause for our long-term absence and earlier intervention by managers during sickness absence."

It also highlighted work in this area, including case conferences with the council's occupational health provider, a reduction in cases of absence of more than nine months from 30 to 18 and "a stress and mental health inspections approach" within services.

"We feel we need to do rather more than monitor," said Ms Fogarty. 

"I think there is absolutely truth in the fact that some of this is a hangover post-Covid, different patterns of working, remoteness perhaps between teams, different patterns of recording (absence).

"It very much needs a deep dive, not only to understand the different natures of sickness absence but what more there is that we can be doing to tackle it. 

"We are an excellent authority in terms of staff wellbeing and preventative activity, we score very highly on all of those things, but there clearly is more that needs to be done.

"Whether it is something to do with the recording of data or whether it is more activity that we need to undertake, but we are going to have a deep dive. We can't just accept this level any longer."

Leader Cllr Izzi Seccombe advocated looking at how the data was recorded, potentially separating short and long-term illness statistics "so that we as members have more access to data that is going to help us in our considerations".

There was broad agreement with opposition councillors with the matter set to be discussed in future group leader sessions, private meetings of the leads from each political party.