Departmental Sick Leave

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (1) what the average duration of single periods of sick leave taken by staff in (a) his Department, (b) its agencies and (c) the non-departmental bodies for which it has responsibility who gave (i) stress and (ii) mental health and behavioural disorders as the reason for their absence was in each of the last 10 years; and if he will make a statement; (216165)

(2) how many staff in (a) his Department, (b) its agencies and (c) the non-departmental bodies for which it has responsibility have taken sick days due to (i) stress and (ii) mental health and behavioural disorders in each of the last 10 years; what proportion of staff of each body this represented in each year; and if he will make a statement;

(3) how many sick days were taken by employees in (a) his Department, (b) its agencies and (c) the non-departmental bodies for which it has responsibility due to (i) stress and (ii) mental health and behavioural disorders in each of the last 10 years; what proportion of sick days taken this represented in each case; and if he will make a statement.

The information is not available or held centrally, and could only be provided incompletely and at a disproportionate cost. Information on sickness absence for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006-07 has been published and can be obtained from the civil service website:

http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/about/statistics/sickness.asp

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the average duration of single periods of sick leave taken by staff in (a) his Department, (b) its agencies and (c) the non-departmental bodies for which it has responsibility was in each of the last five years; and if he will make a statement. (216166)

The information is not available or held centrally, and could be provided incompletely and only at a disproportionate cost. Information on sickness absence for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006-07 has been published and can be obtained from the civil service website:

http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/about/statistics/sickness.asp

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many and what percentage of staff in his Department have had more than two periods of sickness absence of less than five days in each of the last three years. (218699)

The information currently recorded on the Department's personnel computer system is provided in the following table.

	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08
Number of staff	17,924	18,939	19,381
Percentage of total workforce	12.1	13.5	14.9

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many staff in his Department have had five or more periods of sickness absence of less than five days in two or more of the last five years. (218959)

The number of staff currently recorded on the Department’s personnel computer system as having had five or more periods of sickness absence of less than five days in two or more of the last five years is 4,851. DWP currently employs more than 114,000 full and part time staff.

Volume 479: debated on Monday 29 September 2008