Folkestone & Hythe District Council Long-Term Sickness Absence Surges

Long-term sickness absence rose by two-thirds at Folkestone & Hythe District Council, with mental health-related conditions accounting for 42% of all working time lost. The council says it hopes the increase is a blip. The harder question is whether staff are getting help before they reach breaking point.

The person taking a difficult housing call, the member of staff keeping Hythe Pool running, the officer dealing with a resident who has nowhere to live: none of them appears by name in Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s latest HR report.

They appear as days lost.

During 2025/26, council staff lost 2,434 working days to long-term sickness absence.

That is about 487 working weeks.

It is also 973 days more than the year before.

The council’s own report says long-term absence has “increased markedly”. At the Personnel Committee, Chief HR Officer Andrina Smith (pictured) called it an “unusual spike” and said the council was “hoping it was just a kind of a blip for a year”.

Perhaps it is.

But a blip is something you can usually see in the rear-view mirror. For now, this is the highest number of long-term sickness days recorded in the council’s published table since it began separating short-term and long-term absence in 2014/15.

The people behind those days were absent for at least four weeks. Some were away for much longer.

The problem is not coughs and colds

Average sickness absence rose from 6.27 days per employee in 2024/25 to 7.88 days in 2025/26.

Across the workforce, the total number of working days lost rose from 2,809 to 3,575.

The increase did not come from short-term illness.

Short-term sickness days fell for a third year in a row, from 1,348 to 1,141.

Long-term sickness days rose from 1,461 to 2,434.

That is an increase of 66.6% in a single year.

There were 37 long-term absence cases. They made up only 7.7% of recorded absences, but accounted for 68% of all working time lost.

A small number of cases cast a very long shadow.

The council remains below the Local Government Association’s reported average of 8.8 sickness days per worker. That is relevant. It is not comforting enough to make the local rise disappear.

In a workforce averaging 453.5 people, hundreds of additional days lost have to be absorbed somewhere.

A colleague covers the work. A manager changes priorities. A resident waits longer. A service becomes thinner.

The public may never know why.

Mental health sits at the centre of the figures

The council says mental ill health and stress were the most common reason for long-term sickness absence, accounting for 46% of long-term cases.

Across all sickness absence, 42% of working time lost was placed in the category covering “stress, depression, anxiety, mental health, fatigue”.

That is not a marginal issue buried in the footnotes. It is the largest part of the story.

Ms Smith told councillors that the council had seen an increase in long-term mental health cases and that they were “getting more and more complex to deal with”.

“They’re not the easiest ones to resolve,” she said, because it can be difficult to foresee when someone will be able to return to work.

The aim is to give people enough time to recover.

“You want to give people ample opportunity to recover and come back to work,” she told the committee.

But she also described the point at which the council has to decide whether recovery is likely as “a very difficult judgement call”.

Two formal hearings relating to long-term sickness absence ended in dismissal during the year. The report does not say those cases involved mental ill health, and no such assumption should be made.

Cllr Jennifer Hollingsbee brought the discussion back to the people behind the process.

“We don’t want people really to go out of work,” she said. “We want to keep people in work as much as possible.”

She pointed to the cost of living and wider national pressures.

That is the part an HR table cannot show.

A council employee does not stop being a parent, carer, tenant, mortgage payer or worried family member when they start work.

The council has support. Does anyone know whether it works?

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has a long list of wellbeing measures.

It offers occupational health support, return-to-work interviews, counselling, an Employee Assistance Programme, financial and debt advice, flexible working, stress risk assessments, reasonable adjustments, resilience training and health and wellbeing activities.

It also has 45 trained Mental Health First Aiders.

That is roughly one for every ten employees.

 

Then Cllr Connor McConville (pictured) asked the question the report did not answer.

How many staff actually use them?

He asked how many employees approach Mental Health First Aiders, how many engage with financial wellbeing support, and whether the council could identify patterns between low use of support and high levels of stress-related absence.

“If they’re not engaging in those services, then why?” he asked.

“Is it worthwhile having them?”

That was the most important question of the meeting.

The council does not currently monitor that information.

Ms Smith said it could look at an anonymised tally and bring the figures back to members.

No councillor needs names. No manager needs the details of a private conversation.

But the council does need to know whether its support is trusted, visible and accessible.

A service can exist on paper and still fail to reach the person who needs it.

When mental health-related conditions account for 42% of all working time lost, a long list of initiatives is not the same thing as evidence that they are working.

The strain appears closer to the public

Cllr Nicola Keen (pctured) asked whether the long-term absence cases were concentrated in one department.

Ms Smith’s answer was brief.

“No.”

She said the cases were spread across several areas, but were more common in external-facing roles than in corporate services.

That detail matters.

External-facing staff are often dealing with people when life is already difficult: homelessness, unpaid bills, complaints, planning disputes, benefit claims, enforcement action or distressing personal circumstances.

The council’s report lists training in difficult conversations, telephone conflict, domestic abuse, homelessness, brain injuries and safeguarding.

That tells its own story about the work some employees are expected to handle.

The public sees the person on the phone, behind the counter or at the other end of the email.

The council needs to see them too.

Google, Netflix and the missing 45%

The report says the council’s engagement with staff is “in-depth and purposeful”.

Its Employee Net Promoter Score, which measures how likely staff are to recommend the council as a place to work, rose from +29 to +38.

The report says this puts Folkestone & Hythe “on a par with some large well-known organisations, such as Google and Netflix”.

Google and Netflix make an unexpected appearance in a Folkestone council HR report.

There is good news here. A rising engagement score is positive.

But the response rate was 55%.

That means 45% of employees did not take part.

The lowest-scoring question was optimism about Local Government Reorganisation. Only 36% of respondents were optimistic, while 41% were neutral and 23% were pessimistic.

The council has also run meditation sessions, mindful painting, quizzes, Menopause Cafés and a chill-out space for staff to use after difficult calls.

None of that is trivial.

But the council’s own figures show that long-term sickness rose sharply while mental health-related conditions accounted for a large share of the time lost.

The test is not how many wellbeing activities can be listed.

The test is whether fewer people become too unwell to work.

“Getting a house in order”

The HR team is also preparing for Local Government Reorganisation.

For residents, that phrase can sound like council maps, political arguments and another layer of bureaucracy.

For staff, it is much more basic.

Will they be paid correctly? Will their contract be on file? Will their job description match the work they actually do? Will their hours be recorded properly? Will their building pass work on day one?

Ms Smith described the work as “getting a house in order”.

The report says the council is ensuring every role has an up-to-date job description, every employee has a signed contract and any contractual changes are recorded, the payroll hierarchy is 100% accurate, and the exact working patterns of part-time and flexible employees are known.

That is sensible work.

What the report does not say is how untidy the house currently is.

How many contracts are missing? How many job descriptions are out of date? How many working patterns need to be corrected? Is the payroll hierarchy already accurate, or is there a gap?

If the answer is none, the council should say so.

If the answer is more than none, councillors and staff should know the scale of the task.

The committee heard that implementing a new payroll system could take around eight months. A future authority may need to run separate payrolls for a time or build a system capable of handling several different sets of terms and conditions.

Chief Executive Dr Susan Priest (pictured) said the day-one requirements were a “red flag, flashing red light”.

She pointed to something as simple as staff passes.

“If they don’t,” she said, “then our residents won’t have the continuity of care.”

That is the real meaning of Local Government Reorganisation.

A new council can have a logo, a constitution and a chief executive. If staff cannot get into the building or be paid properly, residents will quickly discover which part of the machine actually matters.

There is also a small but telling error in the report itself.

Section 15.1 says preparation will continue for a vesting day in April 2026, even though the report was prepared for a June 2026 meeting and the committee discussion referred to April 2028.

It’s plainly a typo.

In a section about not missing key dates, it is almost too neat.

More disciplinary cases, but not a story of rampant misconduct

The report also shows that disciplinary cases rose from eight in 2024/25 to 15 in 2025/26.

That is an increase of 87.5%.

The number looks dramatic. The detail is less so.

The 15 cases resulted in two verbal warnings, eight first written warnings and one final written warning. All 11 warnings were issued by agreement under section 4.4 of the council’s disciplinary procedure, without a full disciplinary hearing.

Three employees left before their cases were concluded and one case remained ongoing.

There was no disciplinary dismissal recorded for the year.

Ms Smith told councillors that most of the cases were relatively low in severity.

“Part of the discipline,” she said, “is about correcting behaviour, not necessarily punitive all the time.”

There were dismissals under other procedures: one following a capability case, one after a failed probationary period and two following long-term sickness absence hearings.

Those are separate matters and should not be bundled together to make the figures look worse than they are.

Hope is not a workforce strategy

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s workforce is not in freefall.

Headcount rose slightly from 452 to 456. The council recruited 43 new starters and processed 41 leavers.

Crude turnover fell from 11.16% to 9.04%.

Voluntary turnover fell from 8.26% to 6.84%.

Short-term sickness is down. Staff engagement has improved. The council has invested in training, wellbeing and preparation for the future.

The evidence earns that balance.

But the same evidence also shows a two-thirds rise in long-term sickness days, a heavy concentration of time lost to mental health-related conditions, and a gap in the council’s understanding of whether some support services are being used.

The council hopes the increase is a blip.

Hope is not a workforce strategy.

The next report should show whether long-term sickness has fallen, how often key support services are approached, whether external-facing staff need more protection, and how much of the council’s Local Government Reorganisation housekeeping remains unfinished.

The obvious question is not whether the council has a wellbeing page.

It is whether the person handling the next difficult housing call, council tax query or complaint gets the support they need before they become the next long-term absence case.

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The Shepway Vox Team

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