Britain’s biggest employers join drive to tackle workplace ill health

More than 250 of the UK's biggest employers had signed up to the Get Britain Working taskforce as Sir Charlie Mayfield pushed a workplace-health agenda aimed at cutting sickness absence and lifting output. The review puts the cost of poor workforce health at about £85 billion a year, while government figures say 2.8 million people were out of work because of long-term sickness.

Pat McFadden, Peter Kyle and Liz Kendall asked the former John Lewis chairman in November 2024 to lead the Keep Britain Working review, which launched on Friday 24 January 2025 as an employer-led programme focused on health-based economic inactivity. By 5 November 2025, the government said more than 60 major and many small employers had already joined forces with it. By 31 March 2026, the Vanguard phase had expanded to around 150 organisations employing about 1.5 million workers across 24 sectors, alongside 10 mayoral and strategic authorities and representatives from all the nations of the UK.

One in five working-age adults are out of the labour force substantially because of health problems, and the number of people out of work for that reason is about 800,000 higher than in 2019. Disabled people remain locked out of work at twice the rate of non-disabled people, a gap that is both a labour-market failure and a growth constraint.

The proposed response is built around workplace intervention rather than only benefit reform. The review has set out a Workplace Health Provision, a non-clinical case-management service designed to support employees and line managers across the employment lifecycle, alongside a new Healthy Working Lifecycle standard. Employer-led Vanguards are intended to test what works before wider rollout over the next three to seven years.

By March 2026, the review was developing better workplace health provision, tackling a culture of fear in workplaces, and addressing a fit note system that was not working as intended. The government has already launched pilots to overhaul that system, and about 11 million fit notes are issued every year; more than nine in ten state that the person is not fit for work.

South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority said the joint effort would drive action to prevent ill-health, support people to stay in work and help employers build healthier, more resilient workplaces. Mayfield has said supportive workplaces matter, but personal responsibility has a role, adding: "I hate my boss" is not a health condition.