Cuts looming but still cash for travel and sick pay

A SCOTTISH council had one of the worst records for sick day rates in the UK at the same time as it spent taxpayers' cash on overseas trips, a new study has found.

Cash-strapped Aberdeen City Council had the highest sickness absence rate during 2009-10 of any UK council that responded to a series of freedom of information requests about how public funds were being spent.

Other Scottish councils were highlighted in the investigations, which showed high spending on redundancy payments and overseas trips at the taxpayer's expense.

Aberdeen had an average of 15.87 days lost per employee, a figure making it the worst performer of the UK councils that responded.

Aberdeen City Council, which is making millions of pounds of cuts in services, also had 169 people on long-term sick leave according to the figures obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Channel 4 News.

The survey also uncovered large amounts of money being spent on overseas trips for councillors and officials.

Conservative MSP Alex Johnstone called on local councils to reduce their spending on sick pay and foreign travel in the face of massive spending cuts.

He said: "The amount of public funds spent on sick pay needs to be reduced and councils need to look at how they can get the amounts down.

"There's also a real need to closely monitor all expenditure whether its on overseas travel or redundancy costs during these difficult economic times."

Aberdeen City Council had the UK's fifth highest expenditure on foreign travel for a local authority during 2009-10, with 63 trips at a cost of 43,077.

The trips included two 'fact finding' visits to Mexico at a cost of 1,925, and one to Lafayette in the US for 2,465.

The survey revealed that taxpayers in the Shetland Islands paid 1,621 for a member of their council to present a paper at a mental health conference in Hong Kong during 2009-10.

A Shetland Islands Council executive director was also sent to the Spanish city of Valencia for the launch of a tugboat at a cost of 1,710 during the same period.

Glasgow City Council also had the second highest cost of redundancies between 2007 and 2010, according to the study.

The figures showed that the council made 1,036 people redundant at a cost of 19,088,107 - an average pay out of 18,424.

However, the authority disputed the figures and claimed it was working to save public funds.

A Glasgow City Council spokesman said: "The council has led the way with a substantial and radical service reform programme over the last few years and as a result has saved tens of millions of pounds."

Meanwhile, Aberdeen City Council chief executive Sue Bruce accepted that the authority's sickness rates "clearly need to be reduced."

She said: "I have set this as a priority for directors and we have already seen a steady improvement on the 2009-10 figures over the past seven months."I've made it clear that I expect this improvement to continue under the direction of the council's new management team."