HR People Plan Update (part 1 of 21)

Welcome, Councillor Metter and Sarah. Thank you. I'll kick off, if I may. Now, I can't, as my vice chairman pointed out, this room's got great air conditioning and he's suffering from a bit of a cold. But I've picked up from reading report and from your oral report that the increase in workforce sickness is a result of the heat wave in the summer. I've got two areas of concern. One is that if I look at page 23, which shows the graph of sickness, I can see in ACE, which I understand is the mostly office -based staff, there's a huge increase from 4 .77 to 5 .79. Well, given that most of the jobs are office -based with air conditioning, why is there such an increase? But I'm generally also concerned that £378 ,000 per month is roughly about £4 .5 million that the council seems to be wasting or not saving in relation to staffing costs. So those are my sort of two areas of concern.

Thank you for the question. So in terms of...