Are Britons getting sicker and sicker – or is our health improving? There seems to be something of a paradox. According to figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) the number of sickness absences has increased from an average of 5.9 days per worker in 2019 to 9.4 days in 2024.
Interestingly, the sharp increase in the number of sick days has coincided with a rise in working from home
Remarkably, it has increased by 1.6 days in a single year – it was 7.8 days in 2023. This is based on a survey of 1,100 employers, which also found that the most common reasons for work absences of more than four weeks were mental health (41 per cent) followed by musculoskeletal conditions (31 per cent).
And this, of course, is for those who are – at least for the moment – managing to hold down a job. It excludes the vast numbers of people who are apparently too sick to work at all. The number of people on out-of-work benefits has surged from under four million for most of the 2010s to 6.5 million now.
But here’s the thing: when you ask the population directly about their health they seem rather positive. Between the 2011 and 2021 censuses the percentage of people saying that they enjoy good health increased. This was particularly true among people towards the upper end of the working age population, whom you might expect to be most responsible for the rise in sickness days. Among 60 to 64 year olds, 71 per cent said they enjoyed good health in 2021, up from 67 per cent in 2011. Among 55- to 59-year-olds it was 76 per cent in 2021, up from 72 per cent in 2011.
There is a caution to be added here. The CIPD’s figures for sickness absences seem to be out of kilter with the statistics produced by the ONS, which claims an average of 4.4 working days per worker were lost last year. Thanks to a reweighting, the ONS figures are not comparable with figures produced before the pandemic so it is hard to discern a long-term trend.
Nevertheless, a survey of 1,100 employers deserves to be taken seriously. The CIPD’s report rather suggests that Britain is suffering from a disease, but not one that appears in any official statistics. It is an aversion to work.
Britain has become afflicted by a virus which persuades us that we are too ill to earn a living. Interestingly, the sharp increase in the number of sick days has coincided with a rise in working from home. Theoretically, this ought to reduce the number of sick days being taken because it frees someone who wakes up feeling a peaky from having to make the decision: am I well enough to get through the day? Instead of having to go out and catch trains and buses, people who work from home can prop themselves up on the sofa and do the best they can. The CIPD even reports employers making this point. Except that it doesn’t exactly show up in the statistics.
It is hard not to wonder whether furlough was the root cause of Britain’s workshy disease. For months, up to nine million workers received 80 per cent of their salary for doing nothing. They were freed from the drudgery but paid anyway. When you take into account commuting costs, many will have actually been better off while furloughed than when they had been going to work.
Who wants to go back to work after that? Furlough was praised at the time for saving the economy from a much deeper dive than it would otherwise have suffered in the depths of the pandemic – although the economy still shrank by 20 per cent in a single quarter. Five years on it is beginning to look like one of the most expensive policy mistakes in history.
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