November 2025 saw the publication of the final report of the Keep Britain Working Review. The independent report argued that the country is facing an urgent economic inactivity crisis, driven mostly by ill-health and the barriers disabled people face in the workplace.
According to the report, employers face an estimated £85 billion a year in lost output and costs linked to ill-health.
Following the publication of the review, the Government agreed to support a system-wide and employer-led shift in workplace health and inclusion by accepting the recommendations to launch a three-year “vanguard phase” to test and build the evidence base for employer-led solutions to develop a Healthy Working Lifecycle and support workplace health provision.
It also accepted a recommendation to create a Workplace Health Intelligence Unit (WHIU) to aggregate and analyse data, consider incentives to drive uptake, guide continuous improvement and provide leadership, as a movement headquarters, across the new system.
In its latest update on these plans, the Government states: “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.”
Before the end of 2026, it plans to develop the Healthy Working Lifecycle into an employer-facing standard, to create a formalised framework for quality workplace health provision and to establish a 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.
Finally, 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.
