Managers in Bradford Council are being retrained in a bid to cut down on the 700 years of sick days clocked up by staff last year.

The authority has introduced new attendance procedures and guidelines to tackle the issue, and has also announced that a major attendance review will take place in 2006.

Each of the authority's 19,800 staff took an average of 13 days off in the financial year 2004-05 - more than 2.5 working weeks each.

A survey by the Confederation of British Industry found the average private sector worker took only six days off sick in 2004.

A Council spokesman said: "Over the past year, new attendance procedures and guidelines have been produced, together with management training across the Council, to tackle the issue.

"While we are making progress, there is still room for improvement and we will be reviewing our procedures to reduce these figures even further."

He said the 257,400 working days lost to ill health is an improvement on the previous year when absenteeism was calculated differently.

He said: "The system for calculating sickness days has changed, in line with recommendations from the Audit Commission.

"Long-term sickness is now recorded in the financial year in which it falls, rather than the full figure being recorded when the employee returns to work.

"The figure for 2004/5 is 13.06 days lost to sickness and the new figure for 2003-04, using the same calculation, is 14.23 days. This shows a year on year improvement in our sickness figures."

But Patrick Kelly, of the public sector union Unison, questioned the figures: "We believe it is more like four or five days per employee in lost time due to the way the authority calculates its sickness record.

"It counts things like maternity leave, people with registered disabilities, hospital appointments and compassionate leave. In the private sector that would not be classed as sickness."

But the CBI said the public sector is not dealing well with long-term absenteeism.

It accounted for just seven per cent of public sector cases in 2004 but was responsible for 57 per cent of all absences.

In the private sector five per cent of last year's cases were long-term, but they accounted for only 33 per cent of total absence.