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🏛️Government moves ahead with its plans to Keep Britain Working

  • HRNews
  • 3 days ago
  • 2 min read

What is it?

Following the final report of the Keep Britain Working Review published in November 2025, the Government has begun rolling out its response. The review argued that the UK is facing an urgent economic inactivity crisis, driven mostly by ill-health and the barriers disabled people face in the workplace, with employers facing an estimated ÂŁ85 billion a year in lost output and costs linked to ill-health.


What you need to know

The Government has accepted the review's recommendations and is backing a system wide, employer led shift in workplace health and inclusion. Its latest update confirms: "We've moved immediately into Vanguard phase and are establishing the Workplace Health Intelligence Unit to drive the movement, learn fast, build evidence for what works, and enable a national scaling in the coming years."


The key steps:

  • A three year "vanguard phase" to test and build the evidence base for employer led solutions, developing a Healthy Working Lifecycle and supporting workplace health provision.

  • A Workplace Health Intelligence Unit (WHIU) to aggregate and analyse data, consider incentives to drive uptake, guide continuous improvement and provide leadership, acting as a movement headquarters across the new system.


The timeline:

  • Before the end of 2026, the Government plans to develop the Healthy Working Lifecycle into an employer facing standard, create a formalised framework for quality workplace health provision, and establish the WHIU to guide continuous improvement and provide leadership.

  • In 2027, the WHIU will start confidentially aggregating key data from across employers and sectors to provide a clearer picture of performance in managing health and disability.

  • In 2028, the Government will use the evidence and insight to support the case for targeted incentives to rapidly drive widespread adoption of the Healthy Working Lifecycle and improved workplace health provision, including across regions, sectors and different sized employers.


What it means for you

The direction of travel is clear: workplace health, disability inclusion and managing ill-health are moving from "nice to have" to central pillars of how good employers operate. An employer facing standard is on the way within the year, and data on how employers manage health and disability will start being aggregated from 2027.

Getting ahead now, by taking a proper look at how your business supports health at work, manages long term sickness, and includes disabled employees, will put you in a much stronger position when the framework and standards arrive.


How Lansbury HR can help

We can support you with reviewing and improving your absence management, health and wellbeing policies, reasonable adjustment processes and disability inclusion practices. Whether you want to get ahead of the coming framework or just sense check what you've already got in place, get in touch with us to find out more.



 
 
 

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