The FT has offered an an analysis in so-called sick note culture today. Its conclusion is that there is no such thing.
The data on sick notes shows that. The situation now is no worse than in 2019. Short term sickness rates have not changed.
However, as the FT notes, this is due to the reason why sick notes are requested. They are only needed to claim statutory sick pay and that is miserably low in the UK, meaning that we have very low numbers of days off work on average in this country as a result. So, if there is a sickness problem in the UK it is not due to people off work in the short term.
The problem, if there is one, is people off work in the longer term. The caveat in that sentence is there for good reason. As the Office for National Statistics admits, its data on many labour statistics is now very unreliable. The information it uses is based on survey data, and since Covid, the responses it gets to requests for information are so low that the information it produces might be inherently unreliable. That is caveat one.
The second caveat is that since it has become increasingly hard to get benefits for being unemployed, the number of people claiming benefits for incapacity has grown. It is not rocket science to see how the two might be related. If you are forced to live without income, you suffer stress. Stress then becomes the cause of incapacity. Benefits are then paid on that basis instead.
The data does, maybe, support this claim. This is also from the FT:
Stress-related disorders have grown in scale, and the number of claims is rising.
But that does not prove there is more stress, per se. It might prove that we have a system that is so mean that it results in hardship, and that creates stress. But that is not the same as stress rising otherwise.
So have we got a sick note culture? No one really knows. The data is weak, and the causes are uncertain.
On the other hand, we can say with certainty that we do have a benefits system that encourages people to claim sickness-related benefits resulting from the meanness of those benefits paid to those out of work through no fault of their own.
So where is the problem? Wouldn't it be wise to end the meanness within the benefits system, reduce the resulting stress, and so encourage people back to work? Wouldn't that make the most sense? And if not, why not - because the evidence of people actually wanting to live on benefits is very low indeed.
I offer a prior warning to benefit system trolls: I will be heavy-handed with the delete button when dealing with comments in this post.
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Totally agree – the benefit system has always been a poor law style system which both penalises and impoverishes people without giving sufficient support. It needs totally revamping!
If you keep raising the retirement age people don’t work for longer they give up sooner…
The figures are interesting
What we dont see of course is either any level of curiosity from The Government, if ill health is rising why? Neither do we see any commitment to tackling the causes of ill health – and your post today about Freedom From Fear has a lot to do with it.
The greatest improvement in ‘public health’ came during WW2 when keeping the population healthy was a major government priority, we could make it that again.
Finally of course if they are worried about ‘mental health’ why not make work related mental health issues reportable under RIDDOR and get them investigated by the HSE, that might put a banger under a lot of employers
The state of the NHS may have something to do with it – that having entirely been created by the Tory party over the last 13 years – chronic underfunding, lack of workforce planning, and privatisation or outsourcing of many sectors, especially mental health services.
A sick health service leads to a sick nation.
It is not surprising that we have high levels of sickness both physical and mental.
I can’t think of any time in my life where people have been promised so much, through advertising and the media yet given so few opportunities either to succeed… or to fail, where the basics of life have been so unaffordable, where education has been so narrow, restrictive and pressured.
I have felt for some time that far from this being an epidemic of mental (and physical) ill health we have a completely understandable response to an extremely unequal, unfair and dysfunctional society.
One should also bear in mind that there is no real separation between brian and body and that response to stress can be manifest in both physical and psychlogical symptoms.
Until a few years ago I taught on an excellent course for students with mental health problems and social and emotional difficulties – self harmers, school refusers etc- and although some would have struggled regardless of circumstance there were others in such precarious and unsupported situations that it seemed we were merely providing sticking plasters and not solving the root causes or even able to access support outside of college. And even back in 2016 a student without family support had to be on the verge of suicide before we could access emergency help…. so I can only imagine what it’s like now. Our department was eventually all but destroyed by a toxic management after several years of cuts and redundancies.
So no, we don’t have a sick note culture….we have a sick and dysfunctional culture which has relentlessly stripped away support and dignity from so many.
It was the despair at this which led me to the conclusion that the only solution was political and that the only way to convince people that we can afford a humane society where all have opportunity and all have access to the care they need, was to have some understanding of economics, to have some answers….which is why I read this blog.
Forty-five years of alleged neo-liberalism, except for rigging the economy in favour of rent-seekers and mind-bogglingly huge bailouts for them when they get even that simple task wrong, has created a country where for 90% of the population the Economy, the Social structures and the infrastructure that is supposed to support life in the UK simply does not work.
Inevitably it leads to social breakdown, ill-health and premature death.
It is astonishing that100 years of rising life expectancy in the UK has not only ground to a halt, but that in many parts of the UK life expectancy has actually started to decrease. And this started long before Covid.
That this receives so little coverage, and that coverage is mostly denial, shows that the rich and powerful are engaged in their usual activity of trying to distract attention away from reality by inventing fake culture wars stories like “Sick Note Culture”