Officer sickness (FOI Ref:1762A/25)
FOI Request Reference: 1762A/25
Thank you for your request for information, received 20/8/2025
Request
How many police officers are on stress, stress-related or mental health leave?
How many have been on leave for more than 7 days?
How many have been on leave for more than two weeks?
How many have been on leave for more than one month?
What is the longest a police officer (currently on the leave) - has been on this type of leave?
Response
Please find enclosed our response.
This is based on August 1st data as this is the last report we completed for sickness and is done on the 1st of each month. For the purpose of question 4, I have used anyone who has been off for 31 days or more as we record the data in days and not weeks or months etc.
Q1.How many police officers are on stress, stress-related or mental health leave? 155
Q2.How many have been on leave for more than 7 days? 148
Q3.How many have been on leave for more than two weeks? 142
Q4.How many have been on leave for more than one month? 104
Q5.What is the longest a police officer (currently on the leave) - has been on this type of leave? 544 days
We do not underestimate the stress and pressures officers and staff can face in their work and it’s important to us that they feel supported and able to ask for help if they need it during this time.
We regularly look at ways we can improve the health and wellbeing services offered to our staff.
Policing is a fantastic and rewarding career for many people. Most people that join the police do so to make a positive difference to communities and to protect others and as a force our priority is to ensure they feel supported to be able to do that job.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are considered when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be considered when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.