As employers face growing expectations to support workforce health and wellbeing, questions are emerging over how the UK’s approach to prevention, healthcare and employment could evolve under Prime Minister Andy Burnham. In this commentary, Dave Capper, CEO of Westfield Health, explores what the new government’s priorities could mean for employers, the role of private health provision, and why early intervention will remain central to keeping people healthy and in work.
Andy Burnham takes office with a record from Greater Manchester that says a lot about his priorities. He founded the Good Employment Charter, pushed for a real Living Wage, and has consistently argued that good work, fair pay and prevention are fundamental to both productivity and public health.
That’s a strong signal he’ll place workforce health closer to the centre of economic policy than his predecessors did.
For employers, that’s a positive development. Burnham has long argued that health is shaped as much by the quality of people’s jobs and everyday lives as by the healthcare system itself.
In practice, that points toward a government that expects employers to play an active role: supporting wellbeing, reducing health inequalities, and helping people stay in work rather than leaving it.
The interesting question for our sector is what this means for the relationship between the NHS and private health provision.
Burnham has spent his career arguing against a bigger role for private providers inside the NHS, and that instinct is likely to mean a renewed push to strengthen public provision, which would warrant a shift towards more specialist, preventative provision privately too.
His early moves in office back this up: he’s already pivoted toward social care reform to ease NHS pressure, and has said welfare reform should cut the benefits bill through prevention and support into work, not through crude cuts.
But the scale of the UK’s health challenge makes this unlikely to become a straight choice between public and private. An ageing workforce, rising economic inactivity and growing demand for both physical and mental health support mean the whole health system needs to pull in the same direction rather than compete for the job.
Burnham’s ambition is to shift the whole system toward prevention, catching problems before they escalate rather than treating them once they have.
That doesn’t reduce what’s needed from employers; it depends on it. Most of the early signs of a health problem show up at work, in a change in someone’s performance, in rising absence, in a conversation with a manager, long before they ever reach a GP or a hospital.
A more preventative NHS still relies on those signs being picked up somewhere. If workplaces aren’t part of that, people are still caught too late, just at an earlier stage of a longer wait.
What employers can add is speed: making sure someone can be pointed toward the right support quickly, rather than losing weeks working out where to go.
This isn’t a theoretical gap, either. Our research found that three-quarters of people who left work due to ill health say their previous employer didn’t provide the support they needed while they were still in the job, and 63% say earlier intervention could have kept them in work.
Those numbers show exactly where the gap already sits: on the employer side, in the speed and clarity of support people receive that prevents them reaching crisis point.
That’s a bigger ask for employers, not a smaller one. But it’s an advantage, not just a cost. Burnham has built his career on the idea that good work and good health go together; the employers who prove that in practice, showing their health strategies improve productivity and reduce absence, will be better aligned with where his government is heading than those waiting to see what it does next.
