Icy roads for residents special treatment for Councilors and Senior Management
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Posts
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Yes you are right it was 10.9%,and they look at between 11%-12% as a target,pathetic hard to believe a a manager will probably walk away with a £20,000 bonus for figures like that,should be sacked.I get my figures from the news item on Wrexham.com further down the page,Ok?????
The 37% is the 21st century bad back syndrome, not all obviously but you are not allowed to discuss or debate it these days, councils and companies are s*** scared of questioning it for fear of reprisals. INCOMING expected !
Actually the figure is 10.9 DAYS not percent. It is a massive difference. It’s roughly a 400% exaggeration. Maybe if you actually read the full report rather than just rely on Website news, you would be a bit better informed. The report is available online. And no, it is nothing to do with me, I work elsewhere, so I don’t believe I need my ass kicking, maybe you do for grossly inaccurate statements though :-)
Breaking down the actual report – there are a few areas that are abysmal.
Looking at the spiralling increase in agency worker costs on a like for like period each year:
*Interim Period 2016/17 -£1,198,984
*Interim Period 2017/18 -£1,441,765 +17%
*Interim Period 2018/19 -£2,118,303 +32%
That is not a sustainable cost increase trend when we are looking at cuts elsewhere in the difficult decisions. Any money saved is going to be sunk into these agency worker wage costs.
Council have been heavily criticised in the past for the high cost of using 3rd party consultants – now surely the same thing needs to happen for the workforce in recruitment. It is too costly.
The other alarming figures are the high volume of FTE days lost due to people who have been ill for 21 days and longer in any given year.
Particularly high losses in working days from the sheer volume in schools plus high levels in child and adult social care. Now I know these are highly stressful environments – but equally they are places where if we don’t have the right staff in place or a staffing shortfall people across the county really start to suffer. As usual children, the disabled and the elderly.
I think the include everyone who is off for greater than 21 days is not fit for purpose to evaluate who is likely to be well enough to come back from work.
Some people could be off for a month and break a leg or have an operation etc… then come back to work and there’s no problem.
But what about the people who have been off for something like 90 days+ you’d want to know about those in your data and see how many were there and what can be done to see about getting them back into work or if they are unfit for the job.
I appreciate that it’s a difficult situation as you can’t just lay off people because they have fallen ill for any reason. But ultimately we are paying for all this through our council tax. It’s a public service so we need to be seeing fair value.
I think there needs to be more toughness is letting those go who really are just draining resources and causing high costs of doubling employment with another full time staff member of agency workers. These zombies are also blocking someone who is unemployed but fit and well from potentially getting a valuable employment role with the council.
Some people might think this is harsh but if they were private sector workers and were seriously costing businesses money on the bottom line they’d have been laid off months before I even start raising eyebrows.
Isn’t PIP (controversial and not fit for purpose I know but still removes burden directly from the council to support them) – supposed to be there to for those who are long term ill? I mean some of them must have been serious as the council stated there were deaths in the figures. Surely those people would be so critically ill it would be more fair to them to say don’t worry about coming back to work you are not fit to work. Focus on your health and family.
Don’t shoot me as I’m looking at this purely from an objective statistical and Systems point of view. I can sympathise and know it’s difficult on a personal level if you, a family member or a work colleague is off critically ill. We don’t want to throw people on the bonfire and leave them unable to fend for themselves. But how do things move forward?
If the root cause is stress and anxiety for high levels of long term absence then something needs to be put in place to prevent it from happening as it’s an avalanche – the more people off Ill – the more work and more stressful it becomes for existing workers.
[quote=mike davies]Actually the figure is 10.9 DAYS not percent. It is a massive difference. It’s roughly a 400% exaggeration. Maybe if you actually read the full report rather than just rely on Website news, you would be a bit better informed. The report is available online. And no, it is nothing to do with me, I work elsewhere, so I don’t believe I need my ass kicking, maybe you do for grossly inaccurate statements though :-)[/quote]
To give some info on the data confusion – percentage figures are mentioned in the article quoting the councillor – webcast link is here too : https://wrexham.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/399644/start_time/3894000/start_time/1756000?force_language_code=en_GB
The percentages do seem at odds with page 11 of the report https://moderngov.wrexham.gov.uk/documents/s13813/Item%206.pdf which has the table.
Lead Member and Officer did not seem to pull up any issue, with the latter referring to percentages in the answer and two different ranges (one clearly a percentage) when talking about targets.
Rob, I was not suggesting your report was incorrect, indeed the report merely repeated what a Councillor said. Unfortunately I assume it was a slip of the tongue when the figure of 10.9% was used instead of 10.9 days. The actual report would have been available to everybody at the meeting, so I assume nobody felt the need to correct what was said. My comment was aimed at the poster who used the figures as an excuse to make disparaging remarks, (one specifically but incorrectly aimed at me), without actually checking the facts beforehand. Mike
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