Some staff at Carmarthenshire Council took an average of one month off sick last year, new figures have shown.

Sickness absence among the environmental services section of the waste and infrastructure department accounted for 22.1 lost days per employee in 2024-25. The majority of this was long-term sickness absence.

And sickness absence within a particular housing team accounted for 20.6 lost days per employee, while the figure for catering was 18.7 days.

Across the council as a whole, staff took an average of 11.48 days off sick, higher than the previous year but slightly lower than the year before that. Overall, some 76,552 working days were lost to sickness absence in 2024-25, with the majority – 45,736 – long-term sickness.

Members of a council scrutiny committee heard from officers about the main reasons for sickness absence and what they’re doing to reduce it.

Paul Thomas, assistant chief executive, said: “What I will say is that there has been a level of frustration in terms of sickness absence data.”

He said “deep dives” were being done to learn more about what was going on, for example someone saying they couldn’t come in due to a bad back whereas the real reason might be that they were being bullied.

Mr Thomas said a spike in sickness absence in smaller teams could be partly due to employees who were not able to take leave when others were off sick phoning up sick instead.

“They’ve got children, they want to go on holidays, they are not given the time off,” he said. “Sorry to be blunt about it. That granular detail needs to be discussed.”

He also praised the efforts of the many mental health volunteers working within the council.

The corporate performance and resources scrutiny committee heard sickness absence cost the authority £9.59 million in 2024-25, a 13% increase on the previous year, although the figure related to occupational sick pay and didn’t include overtime or replacement staff costs.

The committee report outlined the many steps taken by the council to support employees and said the two leading causes of sickness absence by a stretch were stress, and mental health and fatigue.

Heidi Font, employee well-being manager, said the council had eight mental health therapists who saw employees in need of support quickly.

She also said the council could “fast-track” appointments with medical consultants for employees, and had negotiated a rate with a private health provider for staff who could afford private treatment.

Cllr Gareth John said he found it “astounding” that there still wasn’t a definition for what counted as sickness absence in local government despite all the data collected.

Cllr John was keen to know what the real cost was of people being off sick to the authority and whether trends were monitored such as employees saying they were sick the day after a bank holiday.

Human resources manager Ann Clarke said monitoring was done in such a way as to spot trends like this and that they triggered management action. She added that calculating the true cost of sickness absence was “difficult to grapple”.

She also said that sickness absence cases were becoming more complex. Some employees, she said, had caring responsibilities and financial issues.

The report said Carmarthenshire’s sickness absence in 2023-24 was the twelfth highest out of Wales’ 22 councils. The lowest was Powys, with an average of 9.2 lost days per full-time employee. The highest was Rhondda Cynon Taf with an average of 17 days lost.

The report added that large employers and public sector organisations tended to have higher sickness levels than smaller employers and those in the private sector. A survey of 333 UK employers this March found that the most common period of absence was 4.9 days per employee per year.