The number of people in Britain off work due to sickness has hit a ten-year high, according to research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
Before the pandemic, on average employees took 5.8 days of paid sick leave. But in the past year, this increased to 7.8 days. Short-term absences were mainly due to minor illnesses, the CIPD report said, whereas long-term sickness was typically taken for more debilitating conditions.
As economic conditions have deteriorated since the pandemic, so too has mental health and the accessibility of medical services through the National Health Service. But as well as asking why people might have gotten sicker, it’s also worth asking if we are also lowering the threshold of what, for the purposes of sick leave, counts as an illness.
Among some of the biggest contributors to the increase were Covid-19, long Covid, stress, and mental health. Such conditions obviously range in severity. Still, if everyone were to take time off due to the stresses and anxieties that accompany everyday life, or even the mild cold-like symptoms that sometimes accompany testing positive for Covid, then the entire economy would grind to a halt.
Consider this analysis, from The Economist:
The primary cause [of the increase in sick leave] is in the welfare system. The previous Labour government, and Conservative-led ones since 2010, gradually made it harder for claimants to get incapacity benefits. That helped guard against fraud and kept rates of economic inactivity low. But some people with real needs were wrongly denied benefits. In 2019, after several high-profile cases of people being declared fit for work and then dying, the government reversed course and made it much easier to obtain benefits. Over 80% of the claims lodged in the fiscal year 2019-20 were successful, up from just 35% in the decade before.
Meanwhile, perverse incentives have been added. The old system did a fair job of nudging those who were temporarily incapacitated back into work as soon as they were better. The new one has sharply raised the relative rewards of claiming to be permanently incapacitated. Those who are deemed unable ever to return to employment now get twice as much as those expected to go back to work one day. This gives people a strong incentive to exaggerate their ailments, and never look for a job again.
Already slow productivity growth is causing serious economic problems in Britain.
Sure, some people are sicker than they were before the pandemic. But others are gaming the system.