Civil servants in Northern Ireland took almost 14 days off sick last year - report

Civil servants in Northern Ireland took almost 14 days off sick in the last year - an increase from the previous 12 months, according to new figures.

An estimated £44 million was lost in salary costs - around 4 per cent of the total civil service pay bill in 2023/2024.

The most absences were recorded in Stormont’s Department of Justice where 18.7 days were lost per staff year.

The figures from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) also reveal that more than one in every seven staff (14.0%) had at least one spell of long-term absence.

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These lasted just over three months on average (68.9 working days) and accounted for over three quarters (82.6%) of all working days lost.

The NISRA report, ‘Sickness Absence in the Northern Ireland Civil Service 2023/2024′ found that an average of 13.8 days (average days lost per staff year)- an increase from 12.3 days in the previous year.

This represented 6.3% of the available working days in 2023/2024, which rose from the 5.7% days lost in 2022/2023.

In salary terms, this equated to an estimated £44 million in direct salary cost – equivalent to 4% of the total NICS pay bill in 2023/2024.

NISRA said this is an estimated increase of £5 million on direct salary cost in the previous year.

The level of absence within the civil service departments varied from 9.5 days for the Department of Health to18.7 days for the Department of Justice.

The majority of departments recorded higher absence levels compared to 2022/2023.

The absence level for females (14.8 days) remained higher than that for males (12.9 days) with just less than one third of this difference being due to gender-specific conditions.

Other figures show 56.9% of staff had no recorded sick absence in 2023/2024 - a decrease from 57.8% in 2022/2023.

Staff who had been in post for under two years had a much lower level of sickness absence (8.5 days) than staff who had been employed for two years or more (14.3 days).

Anxiety, stress, depression and other psychiatric illnesses was the absence reason that accounted for the greatest proportion of working days lost (43.0%) during 2023/2024.

Within this category, work-related stress accounted for 32.8% of the days lost.

Covid-19 also accounted for 0.35 working days lost per staff year in 2023/2024, which was the equivalent of 2.6% of all sickness absence days in the NICS for the period.