Mental health top reason for Dudley Council members' sick days, figures show
Dudley Council workers are taking more time off sick, with mental health problems leading the way as reasons for absence.
Figures for the first three quarters of the current financial year, April to November 2025, show the number of full time council staff has fallen from 5,887 in 2023/24 to 5,212 in 2025/26.
At the same period, the number of days lost to sickness per full time employee rose from 8.07 to 9.1 with mental health, anxiety, depression and work-related stress accounting for 11,309 out of around 47,700 lost days.
At January’s meeting of the council’s Social Care and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee, Cllr Kathy Bayton quizzed top officers on the statistics.
Cllr Bayton said: “Do we think there is any correlation between the reduction in headcounts and additional work that existing staff are having to take on.
“Going back five or ten years the predominance of absence would have been muscular skeletal and now it is stress and mental health related.”
Dudley Council’s chief executive, Balvinder Heran, explained feedback from counselling and occupational health services demonstrated mental health problems in the workforce are a mixture which can include home-based challenges and caring responsibility pressures.
Ms Heran added: “In terms of work-related stress we’ve put in support measures, some of that is retraining our staff around using technology better and automating services so we have less manual intervention.
“The last few years have been challenging for the council with the budget situation but finances have been stabilising, so that gives us more to invest in the workforce and we are starting to see those trends turn around.”
The council’s sickness statistics show non work-related stress accounted for 3,315 missed work days while muscle, spinal or joint conditions caused a total of 4,266 sick days.
Also in the top ten reasons for taking time off were: recovering from surgery (4,419), cancer (2,584), colds or flu (2,062), bereavement (2,017) and sickness or diarrhoea (1,722).
