Inside the plan to make every UK employer’s sickness record visible
Key Points
- The Workplace Health Intelligence Unit (WHIU) is a new UK body announced under the Keep Britain Working programme on 3 July 2026.
- It will collect standardised data on sickness absence, return-to-work outcomes and disability participation from UK employers.
- The WHIU will aggregate data by organisation, sector and region, and provide confidential benchmarking back to employers.
- Digital Work and Health checks, modelled on Finland and Japan, are proposed at onboarding and after periods of absence.
- No individual health data would be shared with employers; an independent intermediary would hold it, with sharing only by consent.
- Nearly 200 Vanguard workplaces, 10 mayoral authorities and all 3 devolved administrations are participating.
- A formal workplace health standard is being drafted with the British Standards Institution, chaired by Valerie Todd.
- Economic inactivity linked to ill health costs the UK an estimated £212 billion a year, with 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness.
A new Workplace Health Intelligence Unit will gather standardised data on sickness absence, return-to-work outcomes and disability participation, to give a full overview of how workplace health is judged in Britain.
The Unit is discussed in the second “Story so far” report from Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working programme, published on Thursday (2 July).
Its remit will be expansive and includes:
- Setting standardised approaches to measuring workplace health;
- Collecting data from employers and providers across the UK;
- Aggregating it by organisation, sector and region;
- Benchmarking performance confidentially back to employers;
- Evaluating which interventions actually work;
- Translating the results into policy recommendations for government.
Economic inactivity linked to ill health costs an estimated £212 billion a year, and nearly 3 million working-age people are out of work for health reasons. But because performance on workplace health is, in the report’s words, largely invisible, nobody can say with confidence which employers are managing it well, which providers deliver results, or where money spent on intervention is wasted.
Data, the programme argues, is not a technical add-on but “the engine” of the whole reform and is required to drive accountability, market quality, and long-term improvement.
From absence records to health profiles
Beyond performance data, the programme is exploring “Work and Health checks”.
These are structured assessments of employee health, needs and barriers to work, introduced at key points in the employment lifecycle, starting at onboarding and triggered again by periods of absence.
The model borrows from Finland and Japan, where workforce health checks are established practice.
Checks would potentially be delivered digitally by an independent entity, with an assurance that no individual data reaches employers, who would instead receive aggregated organisational or sectoral insights.
Government could commission and oversee the system, with the Unit acting as guardian of individual health and work-ability profiles, managing onward sharing only where consent is given.
The programme is even exploring citizen assemblies, working with Liverpool University, to co-design what data should be collected and how.
While the data is being anonymised and consent-gated, government will have to work overtime to ensure it has public trust in the new system.
The report acknowledges as much, conceding that confidentiality, consent and trust “will be central concerns” and that there is a strong case for a trusted intermediary rather than employers collecting the data themselves.
If those concerns can be resolved, the prize it describes is “a powerful national data asset” capable of driving outcome-based policymaking.
The review’s roadmap points towards certified standards and evidence-based incentives by 2029, with the Unit reporting annually to vanguards and ministers – and a phased rollout of health checks, starting with larger employers or specific regions, is expected to test the model.
