British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Friday that the government would tighten rules on long-term sick leave in a bid to reverse the rise in the number of Britons who have permanently dropped out of the workforce.
Employment rates among working-age Britons are at their lowest since 2015, mainly due to a rise in long-term illnesses and higher numbers of students, in contrast to other large, wealthy countries which have seen increased participation since 2020.
With his eyes firmly on the national election later this year, which polls show he is expected to lose, Rishi Sunak sought to appeal to core Conservative voters by warning that the current welfare bill was fiscally unsustainable, and with the argument that a 'sick letter culture' around mental health needed to be curbed.
“We need to be more ambitious about helping people get back to work and more honest about the risk of over-medicalising life's daily challenges and concerns,” he said in a speech in London.
Rishi Sunak said that if re-elected he would move forward with welfare reform, including by giving authorities the power to treat benefit fraud as tax fraud.
According to official data, around 9.4 million Britons aged 16 to 64 – 22% of that age group – are neither working nor unemployed, up from 8.55 million just before the pandemic. Of these, 2.8 million are long-term ill and 206,000 are temporarily ill.
The opposition Labor Party, which has a double-digit lead in the polls, said the Conservatives have failed to create a healthy nation or a healthy economy and that its own policies would tackle the root causes by cutting waiting lists for the reduce health care.
Last year, Britain's budget watchdog said a quarter of people absent due to long-term illness were waiting for medical treatment, although it added that cutting waiting lists to 2015 lengths would only bring 25,000 people back to work.
More than half of those with long-term illness reported suffering from 'depression, bad nerves or anxiety', although many said this was a secondary condition to their main health problem.
Rishi Sunak said doctors were too willing to issue repeated notes approving long-term sick leave, rather than advising how someone could return to work.
Rishi Sunak said he wanted health professionals, rather than GPs, to “provide an objective assessment of a person's ability to work and the tailored support they need to do so”.
“We don't just need to change the sick note, we need to change the sick note culture so that the standard becomes what work you can do – not what you can't do,” he said.
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