FI16226
Request
This is a freedom of information request regarding agency workers in your council workforce. I am looking for information for 2024-25, 2023-24 and 2022-23 and have included tables which you can use if convenient. Please provide me with:
- The number of agency workers in your council in each year
- The percentage of the council workforce comprised of agency workers in each year
- The number of agency workers who have been with the council for over 2 years in each year
- The number of agency workers being paid over £75,000 (full time equivalent) per year in each year
- The council’s total agency worker spending in each year
- The overall staff turnover rate in each year
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2024-25
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2023-24
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2022-23
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Total number of agency workers
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Total spending on agency workers
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Agency workers as a percentage of workforce
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Number of agency workers engaged for more than 2 years
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Number of agency workers paid £75k and above (full time equivalent)
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Overall staff turnover rate
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7 A breakdown of the number of agency workers by engagement reason in each year. If your HR system categorises these differently, please use those categories instead:
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Reason
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2024-25
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2023-24
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2022-23
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Cover for long term sickness
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Cover for acting up
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Cover for secondment
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Cover of other long term absence
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Filling a vacancy (no substantive postholder)
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Response
The recruitment of agency workers is undertaken by individual departments and is not undertaken centrally by our HR Team. For this reason, the information is not held in a central location or held in a manner than can easily be reported on. The Council may therefore hold some of the information falling within the description specified in your request, but as it is not readily available and from our preliminary assessment, we have estimated that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’. The appropriate limit has been specified in regulations and for Local Government it is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2½ working days in determining whether the information is held, locating, retrieving and extracting the data. I regret therefore, that on this occasion I must refuse your request in accordance with Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act.
The total amount of agency spend can be found on the Council’s website as part of the payment to suppliers data which can be found at https://www.dover.gov.uk/Corporate-Information/Financial-Information/Payments-to-Suppliers/Payments-to-Suppliers.aspx.
The overall staff turnover rates are as follows:
- 2022/23 - 29.05%
- 2023/24 - 17.60%
- 2024/25 - 11.58%