A new government scheme aimed at tackling long-term workplace sickness has been dismissed by business leaders and advisers as woefully inadequate, with critics warning it amounts to “emptying the ocean with a teaspoon”.
The initiative, announced this morning by the Department for Work and Pensions, will fund occupational health training for 5,000 line managers working in small and medium-sized enterprises across England. The free training, delivered by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, will run between January and March next year and is designed to help managers spot early signs of health-related issues and intervene before employees fall out of work altogether.
Ministers say the scheme will help address what they describe as an inherited crisis, with more than 2.8 million people currently signed off as long-term sick — one of the highest rates in the G7. Government-commissioned analysis has found that around 800,000 more working-age adults are now out of work due to sickness than in 2019.
The financial cost to small businesses is significant. Replacing an employee lost to ill health costs more than £11,000 on average, while each day of sickness absence is estimated to cost firms about £120 in lost profit. The training will focus on equipping line managers to recognise warning signs such as persistent fatigue, changes in behaviour and rising absence levels, and to have more supportive conversations about workplace adjustments.
The Minister for Employment, Dame Diana Johnson, said the scheme would give small businesses tools they often lack. “Too often, small businesses lose skilled staff to health issues without the tools to support them, and that doesn’t help anyone,” she said. “This free training gives line managers the confidence to have the right conversations and make adjustments that could help keep people in work.”
However, experts across data, HR, finance and advisory sectors questioned both the ambition and impact of the programme.
Rohit Parmar-Mistry, founder of Burton-on-Trent-based Pattrn Data, said the numbers simply did not add up. He argued that training 5,000 managers would make little difference to a problem affecting millions. “This feels like outsourcing the problem to already overworked SME managers,” he said, warning that spotting health issues earlier does nothing to fix chronic illness, long NHS waiting lists or wider systemic failures. “A manager can recognise fatigue, but they can’t fix public healthcare or broken work environments.”
Kate Underwood, founder of Kate Underwood HR and Training, said the initiative addressed only part of the problem. While she welcomed efforts to improve managers’ confidence in having difficult conversations, she warned that the real pressure on small firms came from the cost of sickness absence, the complexity of reasonable adjustments and delays in accessing occupational health advice. “Training helps, but it doesn’t remove the financial and legal strain that sinks small teams,” she said.
From a wellbeing perspective, Sarah Gatford, founder of Sarah Gatford Ltd, said the success of the scheme would depend on whether it went beyond compliance. She argued that genuine progress required managers to build trust and psychological safety, not simply follow checklists. “If this helps managers ask ‘How can I help?’ instead of ‘When will you be back?’, it’s a start, but 5,000 managers across the entire SME sector is still a drop in the ocean,” she said.
Others were more blunt. Riz Malik, director of R3 Wealth, described the initiative as disconnected from the real priorities of small businesses. “This probably isn’t on the top 100 list of things SMEs want from government going into 2026,” he said, calling it another example of policymaking divorced from commercial reality.
Scott Gallacher, director at Rowley Turton, said the funding level exposed the gap between political messaging and operational reality. He noted that almost 80% of SMEs provide no occupational health training at all, across an economy with roughly 5.7 million small businesses. “When you break the numbers down, this equates to pennies per person off work,” he said. “That suggests this is more about optics than impact.”
While ministers insist the scheme is a first step towards keeping more people in work, critics argue that without deeper investment in healthcare, workplace flexibility and sustainable job design, the initiative risks becoming another well-intentioned policy that fails to shift the underlying problem.
