The Labour government has pledged to take action to get people back in employment following the impact of the pandemic, as part of measures announced in today’s King Speech.
Since the pandemic sickness absence, particularly for long time periods, has been an increasingly growing concern.
Responding to the speech, Ben Willmott, head of public policy for the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) said: “Long-term health issues have a significant impact on people’s ability to work so it’s vital that the government takes steps to help people get into and stay in work where they are able.
“Health policy is economic policy, they can’t be treated in silos.
“It’s crucial that the government works with employers to prioritise employee health and wellbeing if we’re to tackle the dual challenge of a tight labour market and an ageing workforce with more complex health needs.”
Highlighting the scale of the problem in February, a report from Zurich concluded long-term sickness would cost the UK economy £66.3bn a year by the end of the decade and is causing depression among more than half of workers affected.
The insurer’s poll of 1,000 employees for a joint report with the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) found the number of workers with long-term health conditions had increased by 27% in the last six years to a record high of 10.3 million people.
These workers took a total of 112.5 million sick days in 2023, an increase of nearly 70% over the same period.
Data from the CIPD last year found UK employees were absent an average of 7.8 days over the previous 12 months.
This represented the highest level the survey has reported in more than a decade and was two whole days more than the pre-pandemic rate of 5.8 days.
Earlier in 2023 official ONS data found that sickness absence had increased since the pandemic, with a record 185.6 million working days lost to sickness absence in the UK in 2022, 47.4 million more than pre-pandemic.
Official data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in October showed the number of of people joining the ranks of economically inactive due to long-term sickness since the start of the pandemic was nearing 500,000.