Long-term illness among Britons plagues PM Sunak
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will look at tightening the rules for long-term sick leave in a bid to reverse a rise in the number of Britons who have permanently dropped out of the workforce. Labour force participation among workingage Britons is its lowest since 2015, due to a rise in long-term illness and a greater number of students, in contrast to other large, rich nations which have seen increased participation since 2020.
Sunak, in excerpts from a speech due later on Friday, said the rising number of people not working due to mental health conditions was a particular concern.
“We need to be more ambitious about helping people back to work and more honest about the risk of over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life,” he said.
Some 9.4 million Britons aged 16 to 64 – 22% of that age group – are neither working nor unemployed, up from 8.55 million just before the pandemic, according to official data. Of those, 2.8 million are long-term sick and 206,000 are temporarily ill.
Last year Britain’s budget watchdog said a quarter of people who were off work due to long-term sickness were waiting for medical treatment, although it added that cuting waiting lists to their 2015 length might only get 25,000 back into work.
Over half of the long-term sick reported suffering from ‘depression, bad nerves or anxiety’, although many said it was a secondary condition alongside their main health problem.
Sunak’s office said medics were too willing to issue repeat notes approving extended sick leave, rather than advising how a person could get back to work, paving the way for people to move on to long-term sickness benefits.
Sunak said he wanted to test shiting the responsibility for assessment from family doctors to healthcare workers tasked with providing “an objective assessment of someone’s ability to work and the tailored support they need to do so”.
“We don’t just need to change the sick note, we need to change the sick note culture so the default becomes what work you can do – not what you can’t,” he said.
In another development, a law that will enable Britain to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda suffered a setback on Wednesday ater Parliament’s upper chamber pressed its atempt to amend the contentious legislation.
The House of Lords inserted amendments into the Safety of Rwanda Bill, sending it back to the lower House of Commons in a process known as parliamentary ping-pong.
The government had hoped members of the Lords would stop blocking the bill on Wednesday, relenting to the parliamentary rule that the unelected Lords ultimately can’t overrule the elected Commons. The Lords’ resistance underlines the strength of opposition in the upper house, where the governing Conservative Party does not have a majority.
The bill is still overwhelmingly likely to become law, but the latest move delays its passage, likely until next week.
The legislation will pave the way for deportation flights to take off – though opponents plan new legal challenges that could keep them grounded.
The Rwanda plan is key to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ’s pledge to “stop the boats” bringing unauthorised migrants to the UK across the English Channel, and sunak has repeatedly said the first flights will take off in the spring.
Home Office Minister Michael Tomlinson told lawmakers on Wednesday that the law is needed because “we simply cannot stand by and allow people smugglers to control who enters our country and to see more lives being lost at sea.”
“We have an obligation to the public and to those who are being exploited by criminal gangs to stop this vile trade and to protect our borders,” he said.
It has already been two years since Britain and Rwanda signed a deal that would see migrants who cross the English Channel in small boats sent to the East African country, where they would remain permanently. The plan has been challenged in the courts, and no one has yet been sent to Rwanda under an agreement that has cost the UK at least 370 million pounds ($470 million).
Sunak’s government says the plan will deter people from making dangerous journeys across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and break the business model of people-smuggling gangs. Human rights groups and other critics say it is unworkable and unethical to send migrants to a country 4,000 miles (6,400 miles) away that they don’t want to live in.
The Safety of Rwanda Bill is designed to overcome a ban on sending migrants to Rwanda imposed by the UK Supreme Court, which ruled in November that the East African country is not a safe destination for asylum-seekers because there is a risk they could be returned to the conflict-wracked home countries they’d fled.