An Andy Burnham-led government needs to see fixing workplace ill health as ‘one of the biggest opportunities we have to drive growth’, Sir Charlie Mayfield, author of the Keep Britain Working review has said.

Sir Charlie was speaking the day after prime minster Sir Keir Starmer announced his intention to resign, with former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham now widely expected to become prime minister in the coming weeks.

The former chairman of John Lewis was being questioned at a health and work summit held in Westminster yesterday (23 June), organised by the think-tank The Work Foundation, and the Centre for Organisational Health and Well-Being (COHWB), both at Lancaster University.

Asked what he felt the new government’s priorities should be, Sir Charlie said: “What I would say is this agenda of Keep Britain Working – we talk about it in a sense of it being a problem, something we need to fix. And it is a serious problem but, as I’ve said, very fixable.

“But I can just as easily tell you this is probably one of the biggest opportunities we have to drive growth in this country,” he added.

He highlighted there are around 35 million people working in the UK, of which 9 million are economically inactive, and 3 million of those are economically inactive for reasons of ill health or disability.

Just adding an extra 1% of healthy, productive workers to that 35 million – or even just improving their work prospects – was 350,000 people. “And that’s the size of a major town in terms of the workforce,” Sir Charlie pointed out.

“You don’t have to rejoin the EU, you don’t have to build any houses, you don’t have to open up a new route for immigration, you don’t have to wait for a whole cohort of young people to leave school and join the workplace. We have an opportunity to drive growth that is sitting right in front of us. And actually it is a very attainable opportunity,” he emphasised.

“It just requires us to get employers on the pitch, which a lot of them are wanting to do, and we can codify. It requires us to be reinforcing with employees that they also have a responsibility for their health. It requires us to get our workplace health provision sorted, which again is very doable. And then it is going to require the government to play its role by ensuring the incentives are aligned. And I honestly think that all of that is very doable.

“So I would say for the government, now and in the future, this is a great opportunity we cannot afford to miss. And it is a win-win. It is very rare that you get an opportunity that won’t cost you a lot of money, benefits employers, benefits employees, saves on welfare costs, and can be done relatively quickly. So, we should do it,” Sir Charlie added.

Review update

The summit coincided with the launch by the Work Foundation of a new report, ‘Unequal support: employer views on workplace health in 2026’. In the question-and-answer session, led by the foundation’s director Ben Harrison, Sir Charlie said he was pleased with the progress the review had made so far but that there was still a lot of work to do.

The total of employer ‘vanguards’ was now up around 200, from across 18 different sectors, and the review was working closely with 10 mayoral authorities. “We’re building basically a bit of a coalition of people who have the conviction that we can do this a lot better,” Sir Charlie said.

“If we can just get our act together, if we can configure services in a sensible way, which enables small employees to get access to economies of scale, they can actually access some really good provision at relatively low cost,” he added, highlighting the example of the recently opened Hull Resilience Hub.

This is a joint venture between Hull City Council and occupational health firm Latus Group that any local business can join at a cost of £50 per person per year. For that, they get GP access, proactive health checks for all employees, access to early-stage treatments, and support on return-to-work plans. “It is a pretty good offer, and the first six months are in fact free. If we can configure this properly, and create the right incentives, we actually can get some of what we think is necessary both affordable and accessible,” Sir Charlie said.

The conversation emphasised the need for any future standard to be simple and practical enough to be accessible to employers, to provide a framework that they can apply to their business and experience, rather than being over-prescriptive.

“We have to move away from this scenario where we wait for somebody to get ill and then try and make them better and get them back to work, into anticipating and trying to identify people who are at risk and then proactively going to them to say, ‘look, we’re here to help’,” Sir Charlie said.

“At the moment, unfortunately, the number of people I have met who say they have been signed off work and then have no contact with their employer for months on end,” he added, arguing that the problem is often made worse by fit notes stating employees should not be contacted.

Sir Charlie also revealed that he is working with former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn on his work on ‘Neets’, especially in terms of what more employers can be doing to support young people.

 

 

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