FOI Ref: FOI/2021/2590
Please can you provide the following:
1.Do you have a disability staff network? If so:
(a) How long has it been running?
(b) The grade of the chair and deputy chair
(c) Does the network use storytelling as part of it's communication strategy?
2.The number of members of staff who have provided information about their disability to HR broken down by:
(a) Year since 2010
(b) Grade / Seniority
(c) Location
3.Sickness absence as a result of disability or mental health issue logged by the department broken down by:
(a) Year since 2010
(b) Grade / Seniority
(c) Location
4.Return to work rates following disability or mental health related sickness logged by the department broken down by:
(a) Year since 2010
(b) Grade / Seniority
(c) Location
5.Costs (i.e. sick leave payments, salary loss, costs of replacements, adjustment costs, occupation health referrals etc) relating to disability and mental health related illness broken down by:
(a) Year since 2010
(b) Grade / Seniority
(c) Location
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request.
We have a Disability Network and this was established in approximately 2005. The network is co-chaired by two individuals at Senior Executive Officer (SEO) grade and sponsored by members of our Senior Civil Servant community. The network share personal stories through the intranet, events and social media channels.
We do not record whether a sickness absence was related to a disability. Therefore, we do not hold the information requested regarding absences due to a disability. However, we do hold data for absences as a result of a mental health condition.
In order to ensure that we have fully answered your request for the time period requested, we would need to work with data from both our current and historic Human Resources (HR) systems, which would require us to merge these datasets and cleanse the data to bring it into one source to work with. Furthermore, we would also be required to interrogate the data to achieve the required results and quality assure the outputs as we will need to understand the absence reasons and return-to-work ratios. This, combined with the work required to extract the relevant costs, would take a substantial amount of time. Following an assessment for how long this will take the relevant business areas to action, we believe the cost limit for responding to an FOI request will be breached.
The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is £600 or 24-hours work, and in our view, we would need to exceed this with your request. Therefore, Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is engaged, whereby a public authority is not obliged to answer a request if the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit.
You may wish to resubmit your request with a reduced scope in order for us to be able to answer this within the cost limit. Please see the following advice and assistance which should help with the narrowing of the scope of your request.
Regarding questions 2 to 4, we would like to advise that we are able to provide information going back five years (from April 2016), rather than 10 years, for the following:
- Number of colleagues who have declared as disabled by location and grade.
- Sickness absence as a result of a mental health condition, by location and grade.
- Return to work rates for sickness absence as a result of a mental health condition, by location and grade.
Please note, all of the above information will be dependent on suppression rules and we may be unable to provide a value where the number of employees is less than 5. Please also note that sickness absence information is based on how sickness absence has been recorded in our employee database, named Oracle Fusion, and so we will show where this is specifically categorised as mental health or stress.
For point 5, we would be able to supply costs of sickness absence and occupational health due to mental health. We would be unable to provide details of costs due to disability as we do not hold this information.