Insight: How do we join-up work and health to achieve economic growth?

In yesterday’s Budget, the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, stated that ‘economic growth will be our mission for the duration of this Parliament’. Our Employability Director, Nick Morgan, sets out the centrality of driving behavioural change to realising permanent, beneficial changes to people’s health and employment outcomes:

It's really welcome that the link between work and health is central to this Government’s agenda. In the Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the imminent publication of the Get Britain Working White Paper, which she said will tackle “the root causes of inactivity with an integrated approach across health, education and welfare”.

Today, almost three million people are economically inactive because of long-term ill health, near to the highest level on record for health-related worklessness. This is an urgent national challenge, and the onus is on all of us who care passionately about this issue to come together to put solutions in place that will drive forward the economic growth that the Chancellor is looking to achieve.

Our experience

Physical ill-health is unquestionably a significant contributing factor for why people end up using our support to try and find work, including our delivery of the DWP’s Work and Health Programme. But our experience over the past seven years delivering this service to more than 74,000 unemployed people who have disabilities or health conditions demonstrates that a physical health condition is rarely the sole, or primary, reason for a person being unemployed.

For example, in 2023 slightly more people were out of work because of a work-limiting mental health condition than a musculoskeletal condition. And even if a jobseeker’s health condition can be addressed or managed to allow for work, the effects of long-term unemployment, such as lack of confidence, gaps in a CV, or limited knowledge of the current labour market, on someone’s ability to find and sustain a job are often just as important to solve.

Behaviour change

The Government wants to achieve 80% employment - adding 1.7m extra people to the workforce - to drive economic growth. We believe the solution lies in behavioural change, providing lasting improvement in individual health and embedding changes in mentality and ability to work.

Effective employability support to give unemployed people the skills, confidence and experience they need to successfully re-enter the labour market could be packaged with health-related behavioural change programmes.

An example of how effective these behavioural change programmes can be is our delivery of the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP). The service supports people to reduce their risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Over nine months, the community-based programme offers supportive, group-based sessions with trained Health Coaches who guide people to improve their understanding about nutrition, physical activity and their habits in order that they achieve and sustain a healthy weight.

Since 2016, the programme has helped thousands of participants to lose life-changing amounts of weight. In his independent report into the state of the NHS, Lord Darzi recognised the “power or prevention” as illustrated through the NDPP’s “impressive achievements” in reducing the risk of Type 2 diabetes by nearly 40%.

Our experience shows that for those people with deep and embedded circumstantial health and employability barriers, a people-centred programme based on an understanding of personal behaviours, triggers and barriers could deliver permanent, beneficial changes in health and employment outcomes.

We are looking forward to seeing what is included in the Get Britain Working White Paper, and working together with national and local stakeholders to be part of the solution to this urgent challenge. If we get this right, we can reduce economic inactivity, help people lead healthier lives and ensure more people are able to enter and remain in the labour market. Together, we can realise the growing economy that we all want to see.