Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps he is taking to reduce the number of working days lost due to sick leave in the Civil Service.

The Cabinet Office routinely benchmarks the Civil Service approach to employee sickness absence and health and wellbeing to ensure it aligns to best practice.

The Civil Service provides its employees with a comprehensive range of health and wellbeing tools, policies, and measures to ensure that employees remain in work or return to work as quickly as possible following absence due to ill health.

As part of the Civil Service People Plan 2024-27, the Cabinet Office is undertaking research to better understand and address the underlying factors behind mental health-related absence of civil servants.