BOSSES say a fresh crackdown over sick days has been launched at Worcester City Council – despite days off increasing between April and June.

New figures show that between April and June, the average worker was off for 2.6 days, compared to the same three-month period last year, when it was 2.1.

However, the figure is better than the average for the whole of the 2012/13 financial year when, as your Worcester News revealed in June, the average staff member took 11.8 days off sick.

If bosses can keep up the momentum, they claim the average for 2013/14 will end up at just over 10 days, and may well fall below that.

It comes amid the launch of a new sickness policy which is aimed at cracking down on people repeatedly off work.

Under the new measures, which started in August, people off for four periods in any year are ordered to attend a meeting with senior staff to discuss it.

Mark Edwards, human resources services manager, said: “Anecdotally, things are moving in the right direction. We feel like we might have turned a corner, an awful lot of review meetings have been going on and people are accepting that it’s an issue that needed to be dealt with.

“It is early days but I think things are getting better.”

The comments were made during a meeting of the performance management and budget scrutiny committee, where politicians warned against staff being dragged into work ill. From April new terms and conditions have been introduced which means all sick pay is reduced to 90 per cent of someone’s salary.

By law, employers can opt to offer no sick pay for the first three days, followed by at least £86.70 per week for a maximum of 28 weeks.

But most organisations still offer their own sick pay policies over and above this.