UK businesses are potentially losing an average of £8.45bn every year as the PA workforce spends time on non-work related duties for their managers.

The figure comes from this year’s Times Crème executive and PA Event, which started today (13 May) at London’s Olympia.

The event surveyed 2,066 secretaries with 87% saying that they regularly had to undertake non-business work such as booking personal holidays, while 35% replied that they had to pick up dry cleaning or even have shoes re-heeled (14%).

More than one third said they spent up to five hours every week outside their normal secretarial duties which equates to 1,300hrs engaged on non-work relevant jobs.

Secretaries earn on average £10 per hour enabling Times Crème to calculate its annual figure.

“Many bosses are still wasting hours of secretaries’ time on menial tasks,” said Simon Mayle from the Times Crème show. “So we’re asking them to come down to the show and support the campaign by signing a petition to ‘Save Our Secs’ to highlight the importance of secretaries in UK business and ultimately help them to save pounds by using their time properly.”

There are 650,000 PAs and secretaries working in the UK.