Bradford Council is set to get tough on the growing number of staff on long term sick leave.

A total of 115,067 working days were lost because of employees' long term absences between April and December last year.

A review now suggests the Council needs to take "measured risks" which could include dismissal when dealing with employees who have been off work for more than 20 days.

The authority's 20,000 staff took an average of 14 days off each in the financial year 2005/06, slightly up on the previous year.

That compares with Confederation for British Industry figures which revealed earlier this week that in the public sector the average was 8.5. On Monday, the Telegraph & Argus reported that 227 teachers in the district have been off work suffering from stress in the last 11 months a total of 7,473 missed school days.

Councillor Kris Hopkins, executive member for corporate matters and the new leader of the Conservative group, said the key thing was to ensure appropriate methods and systems were in place to assist those on long term sick to get well and get back to work as soon as possible.

He said: "We also have a responsibility to question senior management as to why there are so many people. Is it the working environment, workload or terms and conditions?"

But Patrick Kerry, of public services union Unison, said he was opposed to the setting of targets to reduce absences and disciplinary measures without the causes of sickness first be-ing addressed.

He said: "The Council seems to be led by the fact that it is in the bottom quarter compared to others and its performance in this area is poor.

"The union believes that there is actually no issue with our sickness records as the Council has not system in place to dis-tinguish between sickness leave or compassionate leave, for example."

Bradford is in the bottom 25 per cent of authorities when it comes to sickness performance. To reach the top quarter would save the Council more than £2.5 million, according to the re-port.

Sick days have already cost the Council £58,000 last year to em-ploy agency workers as cover and that figure did not include the price of paying staff extra to work overtime.

As a result the authority's poli-cies are to be revamped in a bid to improve its "poor" sickness absence record.

The review recommends a raft of measures, including offering incentives to those with a 100 per cent attendance records, improving family-friendly poli-cies and keeping records of overtime worked due to cover-ing for sick colleagues.

The report says the Council has reduced its short-term sickness levels but long-term absence has increased.

It states the need to act "systematically" and "sympathetically" to address the issue.

The report also notes that some councils with much better sickness records begin to take formal action, including dis-missal, against employees on long-term sick after six to nine months off although it con-cedes there is a risk of some cases being taken to employ-ment tribunals.

The Council's environmental services and social services de-partments have particularly high levels of sick days an av-erage of 22 and 20 respectively. However this could be attrib-uted to stress, manual handling and lifting, the report says.

In comparison other depart-ments such as education and school are below the average at ten days.

The most common cause of sickness in the authority is stress, which accounts for 14 per cent of cases.

The report will be discussed by the Council's corporate im-provement committee to-nightthu.