Tackling how much time Bradford Council staff are off sick needs to be looked at by the authority’s chief executive, say councillors.

Sickness absence cost the authority £1.6 million between April and December last year, with staff this financial year set to be off for more than two weeks.

Council officers estimate the number of days work lost per employee will be 10.65 at the end of April, compared to its target of 9.03, but say figures are in line with other councils.

The Council’s Corporate Overview and Scrutiny Committee met last night to discuss the problem.

Councillor Keith Dredge (Lab, Keighley West) said having a set number of paid sick days staff could take, may lead some to think they were entitled to extra time off.

“What I think is problematic is if there’s a time set for so many days off, there is a minority of people who will see that as a holiday entitlement. We need to be very careful about that,” he said.

Committee chairman Councillor Rizwan Malik (Lab, Heaton) said the situation was worrying.

“Overall, it doesn’t seem that we have met the targets we’ve set and obviously that is a deep, deep concern,” he said.

“When you look at the figures, £1.6 million is a hell of a lot of money.

“In this current financial climate, when there have been some very difficult decisions to be made, to have an extra £1.6m is quite steep.”

The number of sick days had been reducing up until 2012-13, but is set to be up again this year.

Head of human resources for the Council Matt Burghardt said the worsened figures correlated to cuts in staffing. He said: “We moved things very quickly in order to get the savings we needed, but we didn’t make sure managers we still had in place were able to do the same job.”

The Council is considering at having physiotherapists in offices to help improve the situation as fracture, sprain and muscular problems account for most of the days off.

Councillors recommended that the figures should be passed to the Council’s executive board and chief executive.