"Someone absent for 4 to 6 weeks has a 96% chance of returning. After a year, fewer than half do."

That is the line I keep coming back to in A National Growth Opportunity, the latest Keep Britain Working report from Sir Charlie Mayfield, co-chair of the programme, published on 23 September 2026. It matches what I saw first hand in my HR career. The early weeks are where the difference is made, and they are also the weeks when the right conversation is most easily missed. As the report puts it: "The cheapest intervention is always the earliest one."

The scale of the problem

The numbers are stark. Around 2.8 million people are economically inactive because of ill health or disability, up around 800,000 since 2019. The report estimates that health-related economic inactivity costs Britain around £212 billion a year, close to 7% of GDP. Around 300,000 people with a health condition leave work each year.

The report also changes the framing. Keeping people healthy and in work is presented as one of the UK's largest and most attainable growth opportunities, not only as a welfare question. That matters at a time when output per hour worked is 18% below the US on the last internationally comparable figures, putting the UK fourth in the G7 (House of Commons Library).

What employers are asked to do

The report's ask of employers fits in one sentence: "Design healthier and more inclusive work, act early, make timely adjustments and support practical stay-in-work and return-to-work plans."

None of that will surprise an experienced HR director. The difficulty has never been knowing what good looks like. It is doing it every time, for every case, when the person responsible is a line manager with a full day job who handles an absence a few times a year. In practice, the ask comes down to four things.

  • Act early. Make contact in the first days of an absence, and keep it supportive and regular. The report is clear that managers should be equipped "to discuss impacts on work rather than make a diagnosis".
  • Make adjustments in good time. Agree them with the person, write down what was agreed, and review them. An adjustment agreed in a corridor and never recorded tends to be forgotten when the manager changes.
  • Plan the return with the person, not for them. The report calls for a return-to-work plan co-created with the employee. In practice that means a phased schedule if needed, the adjustments that support it, a return date and a named person to review it with.
  • Check whether it lasted. Getting someone back is not the finish line. In the report's words: "Almost no organisation measures whether the people it helps back to work are still there 6 months later."

The report also sets out illustrative commitments that the programme is testing with vanguard employers, such as contact on day one of an absence where possible and no later than day 3. It describes them as "early examples of where greater specificity might be valuable, as opposed to firm proposals", so they are worth watching rather than treating as rules. And it is explicit about tone: "This is not about blame or creating a compliance focus."

Where it breaks down

Most absence policies are well meant. They struggle in practice because they ask a lot of line managers: knowing what to do and when, feeling confident about a conversation that can feel awkward, and following through when the day job gets in the way. When that slips, the person who is off feels it first: silence, uncertainty, and a return that is harder than it needed to be.

That is why we built SalusBridge. Managers get talking points when they need them, to give them confidence, and a clear next step at each point in an absence, with a prompt when a conversation is due, so support happens without anyone having to remember. Adjustments are worked through with the person, and return-to-work plans are agreed by both sides.

A shared responsibility

The report describes a new Workplace Health System held together by shared responsibility between individuals, employers, providers, local areas and government. SalusBridge is proud to be a vanguard participant in the programme, and the day-to-day employer work the report describes is exactly what our platform is built for.

If you are looking at how your organisation supports people through an absence, I am always happy to have a conversation.

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