On 23 September, the Department for Work and Pensions set out the next stage of the Keep Britain Working review, led by Sir Charlie Mayfield and backed jointly by the DWP, the Department for Business and Trade and the Department of Health and Social Care. The headline is a new "Workplace Health System": the first attempt to join up employers, the NHS, local authorities and support services around a single question. Why do so many people who could stay in work end up leaving it, and what would it take to catch them earlier?
Keep Britain Working has been running for the best part of a year, and government reviews have a habit of staying exactly that: reviews. This update reads differently. Eleven regional Vanguards and more than 200 Vanguard organisations are already testing the model on the ground. The British Standards Institution is drafting a new employer standard for workplace health support, which means good practice on this issue is heading toward something that can be benchmarked and audited, much as health and safety already is. And there's real money behind it: a £3.5 billion employment support package, including £259 million for WorkWell, aimed at up to 250,000 people, and Connect to Work, reaching a further 300,000.
The scale of the problem being targeted is hard to ignore. Around 300,000 people leave work each year because of a health condition. Since 2019, an additional 800,000 working-age people have dropped out of the workforce through ill health. The government puts the annual cost of that economic inactivity at £212 billion.
Sir Charlie Mayfield put the core failure bluntly: "We've never had a Workplace Health System. That is why the same people appear on the welfare bill, on NHS waiting lists and in the productivity figures without anyone being able to join them up." Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden was equally direct: "Too many people fall out of work because of a health problem that could have been caught earlier."
Strip away the framework language and three things are being asked of organisations. Design workplaces that are healthier and more inclusive from the outset, rather than retrofitting adjustments after someone is already struggling. Intervene at the first sign of sickness absence instead of waiting to see if it resolves itself. And build structured stay-in-work and return-to-work plans, including tripartite meetings between employer, employee and an independent facilitator to agree practical arrangements such as reduced hours, a phased return or faster access to treatment.
Underpinning all of it is a new Workplace Health Intelligence Unit, currently being developed to give employers and policymakers a consistent, comparable way to measure how well this is working. For an area of HR practice that has historically resisted measurement, that's a significant shift.
None of this is mandatory yet. The BSI standard is still being written, and the Vanguards have a year of testing ahead of them before the evidence is firm enough to widen the rollout. But the direction of travel is clear, and the 4 to 6 week window is the number worth building a response around now. Absence management built for the long tail of a year-long sickness case misses the point if the real opportunity to help someone stay in work closes within the first six weeks.
For HR and people teams, that means looking hard at how early a manager typically becomes aware that someone is struggling, and how long it takes from that point to a genuine adjustment being made. For operations and workplace leaders, it means treating return-to-work planning as something to resource properly rather than something that happens informally between a manager and an occupational health provider, if one exists at all. For health and safety professionals, it's a signal that workplace health is being pulled into the same territory as physical safety: something with a standard, a measurement framework and, eventually, an expectation that organisations can show their working.
The BSI standard is the one to watch. Once it lands, "how are you supporting workplace health" stops being a values statement and starts being a question with a right answer.
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