Labour need to get a grip on Britain's Sick-Note Culture...

According to the Centre for Policy Studies, more than half of the five million working-age adults currently not in employment now claim they are too ill to work.

This has become a massive structural problem, the financial implications of everyone else having to sustain that many sick working age people in addition to all the children and pensioners is huge.

A Welfare System Built on Trust That No Longer Works..?

The sickness certification system in Britain has been run for decades on an honour-based model: a single GP can sign a person off work for months, even indefinitely, with no requirement for follow-up, re-assessment or independent occupational health review. Theoretically, this keeps the system flexible and humane.

In practice, it has created perverse incentives and one great massive loophole in which people are just lost in a welfare sick-note benefit hole for ever.

Most EU countries require those claiming long-term sick to be veriified by their employer, and/ or multi-stage medical reviews before long-term sickness benefits are granted, and then there are periodic reviews.

None of this means people are faking illness en masse-mental health issues are real, widespread, and untreated. But the system's design practically guarantees that ambiguity becomes dependency. And once someone is out of the workforce for more than a year, the chance of returning drops dramatically

The many, many problems with the UK's sick not eculture.

The bill for this is MASSIVE: sickness benefits are forecasted to reach £78 billion by 2028, roughly 7% of GDP. That is more than the entire schools budget.

The political consequences, too, are stark. As the FT notes, support for welfare in general has begun to fracture, with half the population now believing the system is “too generous”. This is the beginning of the end for social solidarity maybe, if that's not dead already?

Wider trust is lost: employers lose faith in the system that is intended to protect employees.

And finally, workers with real health problems get stigmatized, tarred with the same brush as the softies.

Final Thoughts

Labour have now totally failed to get a grip of this, and this could well cost them the next election, given that other parties are going to link tax rises with the increasing cost of this.

And this will then further undermine public support for welfare more generally.

So you just better hope you don't get sick anytime after 2030, because the support might just not be there anymore!