Recession improves private sector absence figures

A sharp decline in employee absence in the private sector has seen the gap between public and private sector absence widen from 2.6 days per employee per year to 3.3 days, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s annual Absence Management Survey.

The survey of more than 600 employers shows that while private sector absence has fallen from 7.2 days to 6.4 days per employee per year, public sector absence has remained stubbornly high, averaging 9.7 days compared to 9.8 days for the previous year.

Ben Willmott, Senior Public Policy Adviser at the CIPD, says: “There is no simple explanation for the public/private absence gap, with a number of factors in play including differences in demographic profiles with a higher proportion of women and older workers in the public sector. The public sector also has a high proportion of challenging public-facing roles such as those involved in policing, nursing, teaching and social care.”

The overall level of workplace absence across all sectors of the economy now averages 7.4 days per employee per year. While this is a welcome improvement on the eight days recorded a year earlier the figure nonetheless represents a loss of 185 million working days at an overall cost to the UK economy of £17.3 billion.

Closing the gap between levels of absence in the public and private sectors could reduce the total number of working days lost by around 20 million each year. Reducing public sector absence to the level now managed in private sector services would cut the annual cost of public sector absence from £4.5 billion to £3.8 billion – saving the taxpayer £0.7 billion per year.

That levels of general absence have gone down overall may be partly explained by active measures on the part of employers to tackle absence during tougher economic times, with four in ten saying that they have recently increased their focus on reducing absence levels and costs as a result of the impact of recession. The survey suggests increased employee concerns about job security may be another reason to explain the fall in absence.

Although the survey was conducted before the onset of recent concern about the possible impact of the swine flu pandemic on UK workplaces, the findings of the overall average cost of employee absence (£692 per employee per year) indicates the potential economic damage that would be caused by large scale flu-related absence in the coming months.

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 20 July 2009