BBC staff at taxpayer-funded broadcaster took ‘20,000 | UK News

BBC staff took 20,000 sick days for mental health last yr, with instances of stress, depression, and anxiety on the rise at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster. It is known that 20,884 days of work in the public service have been misplaced due to psychological causes in the yr to the end of March. They accounted for a fifth of all illness absences over the 12-month period, according to new figures obtained from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Sunday Telegraph.

But worker mental wellbeing at the Beeb might be even worse than these figures counsel. More than half of sick days at the flagship company have been taken without motive, and bodily sickness noticed staff out of the workplace for more than 36,000 days.

The report revealed that broadcast staff took an average of 6.7 sick days each across the yr, which is below the national determine of 9.4. However, the BBC figures don’t embody the organisation’s industrial division, which isn’t funded by licence charge funds from the public.

When Express.co.uk approached the BBC for a remark, a spokesperson said: “While this level of absence broadly reflects what we see happening across the UK, the welfare of our staff is of paramount importance, and we have a wide range of measures in place to support people who need it.”

It comes as sick go away surges to document high ranges across the UK, with more than three million jobless households. Nearly 40 % of people dwelling in a home where not a single grownup member of the family is employed are now out of work because they’re sick or disabled.

Meanwhile, the proportion of working-age adults not in a job because they have been unemployed, retired early, or have been learning full-time fell last yr. The proportion of people in a jobless family not working because they’re sick or disabled has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020. It is now at its highest degree since information started back in 2006.

New figures have uncovered Britain’s worklessness disaster. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the quantity of jobless households rose to 129,000 in the yr to December 2024. Workless households elevated from 2.955,658 (13.9 % of all households) in 2023 to 2,085,497 (14.4 % of all households) in 2024, the best determine in virtually a decade.

In the yr to December 2024, a document 39.2 per cent of people in jobless households have been out of work due to illness and/or incapacity. This has elevated from 38 per cent in the yr to December 2023.

Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately said the figures ought to set Britain’s “warning lights flashing red” as “the takers are beginning to outweigh the makers”. She said: “Year after year [under the Conservatives] worklessness went down. As ever under Labour, the numbers are going in the wrong direction.

“And it’s not just the stats – there’s a human cost behind the numbers. Families dependent on benefits, children growing up without the role model of working parents, and ever higher taxes hitting the pockets of those who are in work to pay for these benefits.”

And public sector staff have been discovered to be 60 per cent more seemingly to be off work due to sickness than workers in the personal sector. The share of illness absences across the UK last yr among the public sector workers was 2.9 per cent, according to the ONS. This is considerably larger than the personal sector’s 1.8 per cent.