Better help needed for employees off sick with mental health illness, says OECD

RA Now

Employers and the government need to implement better practices to deal with mental health issues, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Mental health issues are costing the UK about £70bn a year, or roughly 4.5% of GDP, in lost productivity at work, benefit payments and health care expenditure, the OECD’s report Mental Health and Work: The United Kingdom found.

The report said acting early is the best way to prevent poor mental health leading to benefit dependency, both when people are still at work and early on during the sick-leave period.

Retaining a job is easier than finding a new one. Up to 370,000 Britons move onto disability benefit every year (1% of the working-age population), the highest rate in the developed world and twice the OECD average.

The leading cause for such benefit claims is mental illness, now accounting for around 40% of all new claims, the report added.

“Some of the recent UK welfare reforms designed to tackle stubbornly high disability benefit caseloads go in the right direction,” the report states. “However, if welfare cuts are to be made, they need to be matched by increased efforts to address the barriers to finding and remaining in work.”

The majority of benefit claimants with mental health problems need a combination of health and employment interventions to improve their chances of finding a suitable job.  

The research comes as the government prepares to launch the Health and Work Service, which aims to help employees who have been on sickness absence for four weeks to return to work and support employers to better manage sickness absence among their workforce.

The service will be funded by scrapping the Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) Percentage Threshold Scheme (PTS),which currently enables employers to recover some SSP paid to employees if the total exceeds a set percentage of class 1 NICs for that month.