The Keep Britain Working Review was commissioned by the Government and led by former John Lewis Chair, Sir Charlie Mayfield to address the worsening figures of people becoming economically inactive because of ill-health. It follows on from the previous administration’s attempts to address the nearly 3 million working-age people currently out of work for health reasons.

BOHS, which has spearheaded control measures that millions rely upon to keep themselves safe from health hazards at work, has expressed disappointment that the review has shied away from the single biggest cause of workplace ill-health – the hazards to health caused by the workplace itself. According to the HSE, 1.7 million people have their health made worse by poor management of the workplace, leading to thousands of deaths in later life, and tens of thousands of people exiting the workplace well before retirement age with a range of preventable disabilities.

The Society, which works closely with other occupational health professions, has expressed disappointment that occupational health and hygiene expertise is not clearly at the heart of the recommendations. The review’s focus of recommendations is on encouraging managers to play their part in supporting the general health of workers and rehabilitating people who would previously have been deemed not fit for work.

However, BOHS points out that the central importance of a healthy working environment without toxic air, unreasonable physical demands, extremes of environmental stress and unmanaged demands seems entirely absent from the report.

The Report also does not engage with a sophisticated view of prevention of workplace ill-health, according to BOHS President, Adrian Parris. “It’s right to say that we need to humanize workplaces, but we must be serious about it. Workplaces themselves need to be designed around the protection of human health. It appears that the report sees health more as an issue of management and motivation.”

He points to the Forward, where Sir Charlie Mayfield states, “Employers are uniquely placed to ‘do’ prevention – by encouraging safe and early conversations about emerging health issues, making reasonable adjustments, supporting people swiftly, and offering flexibility for treatment and phased returns.”

“A friendly chat and a referral to occupational health is not going to stop someone from damaging their back, from suffering progressive hearing loss or prevent them from being exposed to a substance that will cause cancer in later life.”

The Report’s recommendations centre around developing a “Healthy Working Standard,” although it is unclear how this adds to standards such as ISO45001 and ISO45003 or, indeed, to the extensive health regulatory structure promoted by HSE but often ignored by employers which the report suggests it would replace. BOHS feels that more needs to be done to support standards for service providers with practically no regulation of critical roles underpinning workplace health.

“There are no specific legal requirements for qualifications for people providing most services in support of workplace health, whether that be in relation to training for Occupational Medics, qualifications for asbestos surveyors, expertise requirements for people surveying for noise or health qualifications for wellbeing specialists. Embedding standards such as SEQOSH as a requirement for occupational health provision is more likely to have real impact on health statistics,” says BOHS CEO, Professor Kevin Bampton.

Another recommendation is the development of a new digital quango, the Workplace Health Intelligence Unit, which would seem to be another body to deliver statistics currently compiled by ONS, DWP and HSE. The Society points out that a greater priority is that GPs are updated with information gathered in the workplace by occupational health specialists, so that workplace health support can be integrated with primary care.

While the British Occupational Hygiene Society supports better integration across Government Departments working on the workplace health agenda, the report’s focus on incentives for employers to support workplace health would seem to come at the potential expense of properly resourcing the Health and Safety Executive to take action against employers who fail to ensure the minimum standards of health protection for their workforce. Overall, the Society feels the Report is a disappointment.

“Readers of the report may struggle to understand what it is really recommending, amidst the highly managerial language,” continues Bampton. “The first ‘ask’ of the Government to ‘Launch a three-year scaling of the Vanguard.’ I initially thought this was a misprint, but it illustrates the report is rather remote from the practicalities of most people’s experience of managing and dealing with health issues in the workplace.”