The publication of Sir Charlie Mayfield's Keep Britain Working Review last November marked one of those rare moments when a government-commissioned report says plainly what many HR directors have known for years: workforce health has become a strategic emergency, not a wellbeing footnote.
The numbers in the Review are sobering. Over one in five working-age adults are now out of the workforce, with 800,000 more people out of work than in 2019 due to health reasons. The cost to the state of economic inactivity due to ill health is estimated at £212 billion per year, including NHS costs of £2 billion annually. And without intervention, a further 600,000 people are set to leave the workforce by 2030 if current trends continue.
The Review's ambition for prevention, early support, and better returns to work is entirely correct. Its proposed three-year vanguard phase, designed to establish a Healthy Working Lifecycle and develop outcome measures and data to underpin a future Healthy Working Standard, signals that the government has finally grasped that workplace health must become a proactive, shared responsibility between the state, employer and employee.
The HR community should welcome this. But welcome is not the same as ready.
The crisis hiding in plain sight
The Mayfield Review is not describing a distant risk. It is describing conditions already present in most large UK organisations. However, those conditions are worsening.
The CIPD's 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work survey found that the average number of absence days per employee per year has risen to 9.4 days, the highest in more than 15 years. Mental health is now the top cause of long-term absence, accounting for 41% of cases, and the second most common cause of short-term absence.
The picture from the Health and Safety Executive is equally stark. HSE's 2024/25 statistics show that 964,000 workers were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety. A significant increase from the 776,000 recorded the previous year. Some 22.1 million working days were lost due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety, with stress, depression, and anxiety now accounting for 62% of all working days lost due to work-related ill health.
These are not outlier statistics. They are the aggregated consequence of risks that have been building quietly inside organisations. Risks that are, in many cases, identifiable well before they become absence events.
The data gap at the heart of employer intent
Here is the tension that the Keep Britain Working Review implicitly acknowledges but does not fully resolve: most employers want to do the right thing, but they are acting on inadequate information.
The CIPD's 2025 survey also found that while 64% of organisations are taking steps to identify and reduce stress in the workplace, only 50% believe their efforts are effective. That gap, between activity and confidence in outcome, is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of intelligence.
The problem is structural. Most employer health data is retrospective. Absence management systems capture loss after it occurs. Occupational health referrals are triggered by deterioration that is already advanced. EAP usage data tells you who sought help, not who needed it and didn't ask. Line manager observations, the primary early-warning mechanism in most organisations, are highly variable in quality and consistency.
Meanwhile, the workforce risk profile of a modern organisation spans a wide and complex terrain: psychosocial pressure, financial stress, musculoskeletal burden, sleep disruption, chronic condition management, lifestyle risk factors, and the interaction effects between them. A single-dimensional view, such as mental health surveys or annual health checks, cannot, in all honesty, adequately map that terrain.
The Review itself highlights how the current fit note system is often a barrier to early intervention, with 93% of fit notes declaring individuals 'not fit for work,' often without exploring phased returns or adjustments. That observation points to a system designed around managing departure from work rather than preventing it. This is a reactive posture in urgent need of replacement.
What proactive workforce health intelligence looks like
The Mayfield Review calls for a Workplace Health Intelligence Unit to be established at a national level. That is the right structural recommendation. But HR directors cannot wait for a government-convened body to produce population-level insight. They need actionable intelligence about their own workforce, now.
Proactive workforce health risk intelligence means moving from retrospective reporting to forward-looking risk identification. It means understanding, at a cohort level and in a GDPR-compliant manner, where health risks are concentrated. Drill downs by team, role, life stage, working pattern, or a combination of factors before those risks translate into absence, presenteeism, or attrition.
This is precisely the capability that platforms like WellNewMe are designed to provide. By assessing workforce health risk across multiple dimensions simultaneously including psychosocial factors, financial wellbeing, workplace safety, chronic condition indicators, and lifestyle risks; and aggregating findings into anonymised, statistically meaningful cohort data, it becomes possible to answer the questions that currently go unanswered: Where in the organisation are health risks building? Which employee populations are most exposed? Where should prevention investment be targeted first?
This is not wellness reporting. It is risk intelligence and that distinction matters enormously for how HR directors communicate with their boards, their CFOs, and their insurance partners.
The commercial case is now unavoidable
HR professionals have sometimes struggled to secure board-level attention for workforce health investment. The Keep Britain Working Review, combined with the direction of travel in group insurance and occupational health policy, has fundamentally changed that conversation.
The economic argument is now explicit and quantified. The oft-repeated strategic argument — retention, productivity, employer brand — has been well rehearsed. What is now coming into sharper focus is the risk management argument.
Group risk and health insurance pricing is increasingly sensitive to workforce health data. Insurers and their broker intermediaries are beginning to ask questions that go beyond claims history: What is the psychosocial risk profile of the workforce? How is financial stress distributed across employee cohorts? What chronic condition prevalence exists that is not yet presenting as absence? Employers who can answer these questions with evidence are better positioned to negotiate, to retain good cover, and to demonstrate stewardship to their boards.
The Keep Britain Working Review's vanguard phase is, in effect, asking 150 leading organisations to build this muscle. For the vast majority of employers not yet in that group, the clock is running.
What HR directors should do now
The Review is clear that data, evidence and insight will be central to the success of the vanguard phase, and that outcome measures are needed to underpin the Healthy Working Standard. HR directors can get ahead of this requirement rather than respond to it.
Three practical steps stand out.
Audit your current health data infrastructure. Most organisations are collecting more data than they are using effectively. Understanding what you have, what it tells you, and where the gaps are is the essential starting point. The question to ask is not "do we have a wellbeing programme?" but "can we identify elevated health risk in our workforce before it becomes a problem?"
Move from reactive to proactive framing. This means shifting the internal conversation about workforce health from absence management and EAP utilisation to risk identification and prevention investment. The framing matters for how budgets are justified, how board conversations are structured, and how the function positions itself as a strategic risk partner rather than a support service.
Explore data partnerships that give you genuine depth. The organisations that will be best equipped to fulfil the obligations and opportunities created by Keep Britain Working are those that invest now in building a rigorous, multi-dimensional picture of their workforce health risk. That requires assessment tools and intelligence platforms that go beyond pulse surveys and self-reported wellbeing scores.
Ambition requires architecture
The Keep Britain Working Review is asking something important of British employers. It is asking them to lead on prevention rather than wait for the NHS to manage consequences. It is asking them to accept that workforce health is a shared societal responsibility, not just an HR programme.
That is the right ask. But ambition without architecture produces good intentions, not outcomes.
The organisations that will genuinely contribute to keeping Britain working and invariably benefit from the productivity, retention, and risk management advantages that flow from it are those that invest in the underlying data infrastructure to make proactive action possible.
The government has provided the direction. The intelligence to act on it is available. The question for HR directors is whether their organisation will build that capability proactively or wait to be asked.