Every year, hundreds of corporate group health scheme renewals are negotiated in the UK using essentially the same methodology that has underpinned group risk underwriting for decades: the claims report. How much did the scheme pay out? On what conditions? How does that compare to the premium collected? The answer to those three questions largely determines whether the employer sees a modest rise, a significant loading, or, if the stars align, a flat renewal.
Yet this approach has a fundamental structural problem. Claims history is, by definition, a record of harm that has already occurred. It is retrospective data being used to price prospective risk. And in a labour market where health-related economic inactivity has risen by 34.6% between 2019 and 2024 (Keep Britain Working Review Discovery Phase, 2025), where the average sickness absence rate per employee has climbed to 9.4 days, which happens to be the highest in more than 15 years (CIPD Health and Wellbeing at Work Survey, 2025), and where the government itself has concluded that existing frameworks leave employers and insurers responding to illness rather than preventing it, the adequacy of that methodology deserves serious scrutiny.
For brokers advising employer clients on group health and income protection schemes, the challenge is not just about winning or defending renewals. It is about demonstrating genuine value in a world where underwriters are pricing risk that brokers and employers could, with the right data, have acted to reduce long before claims ever arose.
The structural flaw in claims-led renewal
The group scheme renewal conversation, as currently practised, functions like a car insurer reviewing your accident record without ever asking whether you now drive differently, live somewhere safer, or have installed a dashcam. The past is treated as the best proxy for the future.
In some lines of insurance, that proxy is defensible. In workforce health risk, it is increasingly inadequate. The conditions that generate the largest volume of group scheme claims, such as mental ill health, musculoskeletal disorders, and cardiovascular conditions, are not random events. They are the downstream consequences of upstream risk factors that are, in most cases, measurable well in advance.
Consider the evidence. The Health and Safety Executive's 2024/25 statistics report that 964,000 workers suffered work-related stress, depression or anxiety, which is a 24% increase on the previous year and accounts for over 40% of all working days lost to work-related illness (HSE, 2025). The CIPD's 2025 survey found that mental ill health is the leading cause of long-term absence, with musculoskeletal problems reported by over half of employees as a health condition experienced in the past year.
These are not conditions that appear without warning. Stress, burnout, poor sleep, sedentary behaviour, and chronic pain leave a measurable signature in a workforce's health profile long before an employee files a claim. Yet the standard renewal pack contains none of this.
"Claims history tells you where the fire has already been. Workforce risk data tells you where the kindling is."
The consequences of this gap fall squarely on the broker-client relationship. When an employer receives a 20% premium loading on their group health scheme, they typically have little insight into what drove it and, critically, what they could do differently. The claims report does not distinguish between avoidable and unavoidable risk. It does not tell the employer that their sedentary workforce in a high-pressure environment was a loading risk that intervention twelve months earlier might have mitigated. It simply presents the number.
The economic case for a different approach
The government's Keep Britain Working Review, published in Autumn 2025 and led by Sir Charlie Mayfield, laid out the scale of the problem with uncommon directness. The cost to the state of health-related economic inactivity is estimated at £212 billion per year, including NHS costs of £2 billion annually. Over one in five working-age adults are now out of the workforce, substantially because of health problems. Health-related economic inactivity has grown at nearly ten times the rate of the working-age population itself between 2019 and 2024 (Keep Britain Working Review, 2025).
The Review was unequivocal in its central message: employers, insurers and intermediaries must transition from reactive responses to illness towards proactive, preventive engagement with workforce health. It called for employers to become active participants in prevention rather than passive purchasers of downstream treatment. And it proposed the development of Workplace Health Provision, which is a structured, evidence-based model of workforce health support that sits upstream of clinical intervention.
The financial logic is compelling. Deloitte's 2024 research on workplace mental health found that for every £1 invested in evidence-based mental health interventions, employers generate an average return of £4.70, with early-stage, organisation-wide interventions achieving even higher returns (Deloitte, 2024). The Keep Britain Working Review cited Employee Assistance Programme data showing an average return of £8 for every £1 invested. For musculoskeletal interventions, Public Health England has found returns ranging from £11 to £99 per £1 invested, depending on intervention type.
These returns accrue to employers. But they also directly reduce the claims burden on group health and income protection insurers. A workforce where stress and musculoskeletal risk are being actively managed before they reach clinical thresholds is, by definition, a lower-risk group scheme than the claims history alone would suggest.
What predictive workforce data looks like in practice
The shift from reactive to predictive risk intelligence in insurance is not a new concept at the reinsurance level. Swiss Re has articulated a clear direction of travel: traditional underwriting that relies on first-level evidence, such as voluntary disclosures, is being superseded by data-driven models that track patterns and emerging health risks before they manifest in claims (Swiss Re, 2024). The use of alternative data, including physical activity indicators, engagement patterns, and health behaviour markers, has moved from theoretical to operational in individual life and health underwriting.
In group risk, the same logic applies, but the data operates at a population rather than an individual level. Workforce risk intelligence that is multi-dimensional, aggregated, and anonymised can tell a very different story about a group scheme than claims history alone.
The variables that matter are well-evidenced. The ONS has confirmed that employees with long-term health conditions have a sickness absence rate of 4.0%, four times higher than those without (ONS, 2024). The CIPD has found that over two-thirds of employees experienced a health condition in the past year, with musculoskeletal problems (51%), anxiety (43%), and sleep disorders (43%) leading the field (CIPD, 2025). The HSE has confirmed that 40.1 million working days were lost to work-related illness and injury in 2024/25, at an estimated economic cost of £22.9 billion (HSE, 2025).
These are group-level risk indicators. When they are captured at the scheme level, when a broker can show an underwriter not just what a client's workforce claimed last year, but what their current health risk profile looks like, the quality of the renewal conversation changes fundamentally.
"A broker who arrives at renewal with a workforce risk report is not just a distributor. They are a strategic risk partner."
This is the proposition that platforms such as WellNewMe are building for. Providing multi-dimensional workforce health risk intelligence designed specifically for the group risk market. Rather than waiting for claims to accumulate, such platforms aggregate employee health data across physical, mental, lifestyle, and biometric dimensions to produce an ongoing risk profile that can inform underwriting, shape employer intervention, and provide brokers with substantive pre-renewal intelligence. The aim is not to replace the claims report but to contextualise it. To explain why the claims occurred, whether the underlying drivers are improving or worsening, and what targeted interventions could reduce the scheme's forward risk.
The broker opportunity
For intermediaries, this represents a material competitive differentiator. Group scheme renewals are, in many cases, contested. Employers under cost pressure shop the market. Brokers who can demonstrate that they understand the health risk drivers of their client's workforce and who can credibly link that understanding to premium outcomes occupy a fundamentally different market position from those who simply present comparative quotes.
The value proposition has three layers. First, the pre-renewal conversation: arriving at scheme review with workforce risk data enables the broker to initiate a strategic discussion about health investment rather than a transactional negotiation about claims loading. Second, the underwriter relationship: presenting a structured workforce health risk report alongside a claims summary provides underwriters with precisely the forward-looking data that reactive models cannot supply. In a competitive market for better risks, that matters. Third, the employer relationship: helping an employer understand and act on their workforce health risk profile, before it reaches the claims stage, is the kind of advisory relationship that produces long-term client retention.
The macroeconomic context reinforces the urgency. The Keep Britain Working Review's Vanguard programme, launched in November 2025, has already enrolled 150 organisations employing around 1.5 million workers, committing to evidence-based workplace health provision. As this movement builds momentum, employers will increasingly expect their brokers to navigate not just the insurance market but the evolving workplace health landscape. Brokers who cannot speak to the data will find that conversation happening without them.
A new standard of renewal intelligence
The case for moving beyond claims-led renewal is not primarily a technology argument, though technology is what makes it practical. It is a risk management argument. The data that most accurately predicts the future cost of a group health scheme exists in the health profile of the workforce that the scheme is designed to cover. That data is increasingly accessible. The frameworks for acting on it are well-established. The question is whether the insurance intermediary market will move to capture it.
For brokers, the risk of inaction is not abstract. As predictive health data becomes a standard feature of employer health strategy, underwriters who have access to it - through direct relationships with employer-side platforms - will increasingly price group schemes on the basis of forward-looking risk. Brokers who are not part of that data flow will find themselves disintermediated from the most valuable part of the renewal conversation.
The group scheme renewal has always been, at its core, a negotiation about future risk. The claims history was never more than an imperfect proxy for that risk. It is time the industry asked what better proxies look like and built the advisory relationships around them.