Aberdeen City Council has spent more than half a million pounds on sick pay for its employees in the space of five years.
New figures reveal that, between the start of 2011 and end of 2015, the authority paid out £522,922 to personnel off work with an illness.
The news follows a report, released in April this year, which showed staff at one Aberdeen City Council department were taking more than double the national average of sick days.
This highlighted that workers in communities, housing and infrastructure were off for around 14.9 days a year on average, compared to the UK average of 6.9.
The report added psychological reasons were the most common cause for employees being off on a long-term basis.
Councillor Stephen Flynn, the SNP group leader at the local authority, said: “It’s an incredibly high figure and something I would encourage action upon.
“The key to overcoming this is to create a good working environment, and we’ve seen a very toxic environment within the council, primarily due to the nature of the political leadership.
“I have no doubt this has played its role in making it a difficult environment to work in for the staff.
“I don’t think it’s conducive having the city in the headlines all the time for all the wrong reasons, which is something this administration has managed to achieve.”
However, the council’s finance convener, Willie Young, responded: “The city council’s wage bill is around £200million a year and, when you look at our rate of sickness, it’s really not that big in comparison to other, both public and private sector, organisations.
“We’ve been working closely with the chief executive and others to monitor our sickness absences and to try and drive it down. However, unfortunately in life, people become seriously ill and need time off.
“And of course, being a compassionate employer, we have to help them, because they have got families to support.
“When the SNP were in administration, they got rid of so many people in the council, and caused a lot of the stress that staff were under.
“We’ve managed to rebalance that. Audit Scotland has shown that Aberdeen City Council is going in the right direction, and to say it’s a toxic environment is absolute nonsense.”
