Taxi Driver Online

Taxi bosses 'sick' of council days off

Six council workers forming one department notched a mammoth 623 days paid sick leave over five years, the Citizen can reveal. It equates to six months of every year being technically 'unstaffed' in the taxi licensing unit where the employees are each paid at least £22,512.

Yet council bosses insist the figures for the sick note unit are "well below the private sector average." Each civil servant in the unit has had, on average, four weeks' paid sick leave every year since 2005 – the maximum time any council employee can take on full sick pay.

Bosses of Milton Keynes taxi firms, who joined forces to lodge a Freedom of Information request for the sickness records, are 'outraged' by the statistics. One told the Citizen: "We pay our hefty licence fees to the council and we expect a good service.

"But when we ring up with a query there's often no-one there to answer it. Now we know why – they keep going off sick. "It makes us even more cross because our fees technically pay the staff wages in the taxi department."

But when the Citizen challenged the council about the unit's sickness levels, a spokesman refused to admit it was a problem, and would not reveal salary details.

He said: "The council's overall sickness levels at 8.7 days a year is below the national average of 9.7 for the public sector. "But we are keen to improve this record further to move closer to the 6.4 days private sector average.

"In this small department there was unfortunately a number of staff off on serious long term sickness which can have an unfair impact on any department's sickness records. "In fact, once these long term statistics are removed the true average sickness levels for this department were four days last year – well below the private sector average."

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IDFIMH

Only a civil servant could say that.

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IDFIMH

If they didn't get paid while they were on the sick they'd be at work. I wonder how many have been on holiday while on the sick and getting full pay? They say it's a perk of the job when your salaried.

If you work for the local council or goverment and you fall ill whilst on holiday you can have the holiday again.

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Grandad,

Who can tell? If they're Ill or on holiday or at work....It's just not as obvious as it first seems as they still mope about in the same lethargic manner.