CRUMBRIA: 20.6.2026
ALL is far from well in at least one corner of Labour-daft Crumberland Council, according to our town hall mole.
The preposterously-named “Thriving Places” department has been feeling a little off colour.
The department’s sickness rate is running at almost 10 working days a year per full-time worker.
That’s nearly two working weeks sweating under the 15.0 tog and sucking on the Strepsils.
Mental health is the number one cause of long-term absences – resulting in 242 working days lost. Infections and viruses leads the way for those on short-term sick (144 days lost).
HR bods are closely monitoring the situ across various interactive “dashboards”.
Yet the irony of the “Thriving Places” department being dogged by a range of illnesses may or may not have resulted in the occasional rolling of unsympathetic eyes in the gentleman’s lavatories.
Thriving Places is no municipal broom cupboard. It has a £9m budget and nearly 200 colleagues.
The department also has 34 actual job vacancies but is currently trying to recruit to just 12 of them.
Budgets at the Labour authority, of course, being under the constant eagle eye of the beancounters, etcetera, etcetera.
“Vacant Spaces” is far from being the sickliest corner of the council.
Other departments won’t be setting any records for presenteeism, although given the ball-busting nature of the graft involved, that’s hardly surprising:
- Bins and street-cleaning: 14+ days lost
- Roads and highways: 12+ days lost
- As said earlier, Thriving Places: 9+ days lost
Earlier this year, the Chronic told you how the Clowncil has handed an external firm a contract worth up to £5.7m to perform the miracle of making the paralyzed walk again and getting staff back to their workstations.
Councillors met last week to scrutinise matters; although tellingly the 14-page report gave no cost for all the expensive agency cover required.
Fearless investigators working for the News & Shrug, Carlisle, moseyed on over to the Civic Centre last Wednesday where the sickness statistics were on the menu.
Surely a T-Bone steak for a tanking tabloid?
Yet, for reasons not yet clear, the alleged former newspaper has so far not troubled its pages with a single word about the “staffing and recruitment issues”.
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OH DO CATCH UP: 200 COUNCIL STAFF OFF SICK
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