Council Sickness Bill Promoted To Head Of Department

Buckinghamshire Council's staff sickness bill, which councillors were recently told is running at £378,000 a month, has been promoted. It did not apply. The post was created on Thursday afternoon, filled by the bill at four o'clock, and announced by letter to everyone who was already lying down. We did ask whether a number can hold a job. We were told that it can, that it has a lanyard, and that we should see some of the people who already work there.

An invented body calling itself the Wellbeing Structures Group explained that the bill had shown consistent attendance, never once disagreed in a meeting, and cost the authority nothing in mileage. Absence rose over the summer after months of improvement, which the group has reclassified as a nine month strategic listening exercise, on the grounds that a figure which goes down and then back up again is not a problem, it is a cycle, and cycles get a workplan.

The new head of department has set out that workplan. Nothing is on it. This is apparently deliberate, and appears in the structure chart as capacity. Any other organisation paying £378,000 a month for people who are not there would be a former organisation, which officers describe as the private sector's loss of nerve.

At this point we should be honest with you, because we are a newspaper and that is meant to be the arrangement. We rang the council for comment. A recorded voice said the department was experiencing higher than usual demand, which, given that the department is a sum of money with no staff, is the single most impressive thing anyone in Aylesbury has achieved this year. We held for twenty minutes out of professional interest and then out of something closer to loyalty.

Haddenham's contribution arrived on Friday, when a man from the parish council drove to Aylesbury to ask which department the bill sat in, waited in a corridor for most of the afternoon, and came home with a leaflet about posture. He has framed it. We have seen the frame. It is a good frame. Better, we would say, than the leaflet deserves, and better than anything hanging in this office, where the wall decoration is a damp patch we have started describing as a map.

He has since been invited to join the bill's listening exercise in a capacity nobody has described to him, and he said yes, because the room was warm, because he was already there, and because being wanted by anything at all is not an offer he gets twice in a week. The bill, reached through its own voicemail, listened beautifully and did not get back to us.