COUNCIL SICK – NO CURE IN SIGHT – thecumbriachronic.co.uk

CRUMBRIA: 24/07/2025

BURIED deep within a frankly odd story by the News & Shrug is the revelation that some Crumberland Council staff are taking three weeks off sick every year on average.

That’s FIVE days more than the national average for local authorities, and holiday allowances more generous than you’d get in the private sector, eg large swathes of the empire shutting up shop for Christmas & New Year, etc.

Of course, this being the timid News & Shrug “newspaper”, readers had to wade through several thick paragraphs of passive bureaucratic bollocks before finding this statistic.

For some time now, the local rag has been acting like a rabbit hypnotised by a snake. It seems to have dispensed with its role of holding the Labour-daft authority to account, and its Council output frequently reads like timid, passive minute-taking.

There were no follow-up questions about how many millions of pounds this Council sickness crisis is costing Taxpayers or any stab at finding out what staff are suffering from and how this is impacting the services.

Most astonishingly of all, the biggest preoccupation of Lib Dem and Labour Councillors at the meeting was NOT the terrible figures, but HOW they should be presented in future!

Should sickness stats be year-on-year, they argued, or quarterly bar graphs with pastel shading?

Because if you can’t reduce sick days at the Council, you can at least reduce how depressing the figures look to the public that’s forced to pay for it all.

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READ it and feel queasy…Cumberland Council staff urged to refer themselves to physio