Sickness Absence Costs Britain £210bn a Year, Mayfield Report Finds

Health-related economic inactivity is costing Britain around £210bn a year in benefit payments and lost output, according to the latest report from Sir Charlie Mayfield's Keep Britain Working taskforce.

Mayfield, the government-appointed back-to-work expert leading the taskforce, has a strikingly low-tech prescription for part of the problem: people off sick should keep in phone contact with their boss.

Getting bosses and workers to have a conversation, rather than simply exchanging emails and sicknotes, could help get people back into work, he said. Talking on the phone was just "one piece of the jigsaw," he added on Wednesday.

The report, published 16 September, calls for more workplace support for people with health conditions and disabilities and the establishment of a Workplace Health System alongside the NHS.

But improving communication was also a way to "rehumanise" the workplace and help prevent people dropping out of work altogether, Sir Charlie said.

The report does not suggest that someone struck down by flu needs to croak through their symptoms over the phone, or that bosses need to provide down-the-line sickbed sympathy if an employee is off with food poisoning.

"I'm not worried about a day here and a day there. It is more about longer term issues," Mayfield told the BBC's Today Programme.

But he said Britain was doing a "poor job" of handling sickness in the workplace, leading to more people becoming disengaged and dropping out altogether.

The numbers behind that judgment are substantial. Around 300,000 people leave work every year with a health condition, much of which is preventable, the report said.

Mayfield said employees sometimes feared talking about long-term health issues with their employer.

"But the fear is also felt by employers as well because they're afraid of causing offence or creating a complaint or a grievance," he added.

Fear on both sides can create a distance and lack of understanding, he warned, with longer absences making it much more likely a worker will drop out of the labour force altogether.

"I have met so many people who have said to me, 'You know, I was signed off sick and I was off sick for a month, two months, three months, and I had almost no contact with my employer'," Mayfield said.

The stakes for the economy are large, in his view.

"If you can keep more people in work, there's a massive opportunity for us to add billions to the economy and, frankly, to people's livelihoods," he said.

"To get that, though, you need to have people talking to each other, and you've got to more actively manage sickness and ill health in the workplace."

Employers need to do more, he said, and employees need to engage with it. Other ways for bosses to support staff include ensuring access to treatments such as physiotherapy and talking therapies, he said.

For HR directors and business owners, the message is that managing long-term sickness cannot be delegated to sicknote paperwork. The report's proposed Workplace Health System, if adopted alongside the NHS, would give employers a structured framework for doing so — and a share of a £210bn problem to solve.