The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) much-vaunted Keep Britain Working review is here. On Wednesday 5 November, the former boss of John Lewis, Charlie Mayfield, launched the results of his nine-month, Europe-trotting appraisal of the UK’s supposed “quiet but urgent crisis”. More specifically, this is the issue of so-called economic inactivity from ill health.

And what the 69-page final report made abundantly clear? That this Labour Party government is hell-bent on foisting the onus of chronically ill and disabled people not in work on… chronically ill and disabled people.

Perhaps most gallingly of all is the obvious gargantuan whitewash the whole stinking report turns out to be. Specifically, Mayfield seems to have constructed it to serve employers first, disabled employees second. And that is what it’s all about in a nutshell.

Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working review: more ableist gaslighting from the DWP

The report boils down to launching what Mayfield has titled a ‘vanguard phase’. It’s some page-spanning fluff about “employer-led solutions” and developing a framework for getting disabled people into work. You might have thought that this was the purpose of Mayfield’s review. However, the government loves a good kicking-the-can-down-the-road exercise. It’s essentially putting out a review to say it needs to do another review.

The first part of this is what it terms its ‘Healthy Working Standard and Workplace Health Provision’. This is the five-stage wishy-washy framework, describing an employee’s journey from work into time off for ill health. It puts forward best practice ‘examples’ of what the employer should be doing at each point. Largely though, these seem little more than a vague wish-list, with little substance, and still less commitment of government enforcement or action on discriminating employers.

Then it’s onto what it calls “better workplace health provision”, but is in reality, it’s hardly more than “support and advice”. This entails the following three elements:

Guidance and support for employees and line managers (saying what is anyone’s guess).So-called ‘stay in work’ and ‘return to work’ plans. These would be agreed with employers and involve workplace adjustments.Finally, it talks of “rapid access” to mental health support and help for musculoskeletal conditions. By this, some 56 pages in, it finally admits it means a mixture of counselling, physiotherapy, and the government’s favourite useless-but-cheap-to-run mental health service Talking Therapies.

Data on disabled people returning to work – not as benign as it sounds?

Finally, we get a Workplace Health Intelligence Unit (WHIU) to:

aggregate and analyse data, guide continuous improvement and provide leadership.

One of its “priority questions for building evidence” revolves around reasonable adjustments. It makes the valid observation that:

opinions on what is reasonable often differ between employers and employees.

It then suggests it’s going to use its ‘deep dive’ into this to:

explore whether it is possible to move towards a set of standard adaptations which should be considered by all employers.

On the face of it, that sounds like a good thing. Having a baseline of what reasonable adjustments employers should be making would give disabled employees recourse for holding them to it. However, in practice, will this simply enable employers to say they’ve met these ‘standards’ and pass the buck when a disabled employee actually needs more?

Reasonable adjustments are never one-size-fits-all. This could give employers a free pass to ignore that disabled people and disabled people even with the same conditions, are absolutely not a monolith, do not experience health conditions/disabilities the same, and will have enormously varying needs.

The kicker is that the government will then use all this data for “predictive analytics” and AI. Because AI and algorithmic software has never discriminated against disabled people and marginalised demographics before. Except of course, that’s exactly what it has done.

Employers are the real winners from the DWP review

Shameful workplace discrimination, exclusion, and harm from employers is barely afforded a tepid, cursory mention in Mayfield’s review. Where it does, the report can’t quite bring itself to call it what it is, instead opting for the milder “structural disadvantages”. We would call that institutionalised ableism and structural societal barriers. But far be it for the billionaire non-disabled (as far as we know) former boss of a giant department store chain to know what those are – or what it’s like on the receiving end.

Instead, for a good portion of the report, Mayfield sets out a series of suggestions that ultimately mean letting employers off the hook.

While it doesn’t explicitly state it, the report leaves the impression the government might look at dismantling or otherwise restricting access to employment tribunals. There’s a few hints at this. For one, it labels them “often adversarial”. What’s more, it talks about the rising cost to employers “from disputes and tribunals”. Of course, the DWP would know. It has lost more employment tribunals over disability discrimination than any other UK employer.

The report proposes implementing an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) approach to reduce the number of tribunals. That might sound positive on paper. However, if these ADR approaches prioritise good outcomes for employers, it could stack the odds against disabled employees seeking justice.

Red tape energy from the red Tory review

Largely, it seems to take a very ‘red tape’ position on the protections disabled people currently depend on and have fought for. It speaks disparagingly of:

at least 7 pieces of complex legislation which impact on health and disability and work.multiple enforcement bodies with inconsistent approaches

This will of course mean legislation like the imperfect but vitally important Disability Discrimination Act, alongside bodies monitoring worker’s rights.

A particularly telling feature of this is the fact it puts these in the context of employers admitting:

fearing doing the wrong thing and that raising health issues or disabilities might cause offence, trigger grievances, or escalate into a tribunal.

In summary: Mayfield wants the DWP to bend over backwards to massage the fragile egos of employers afraid of being labelled ableist – or held to account for it.

What’s more, employers will no longer have to deal with those pesky ‘fit notes’ legally permitting employees time off work. Taking a leaf out of the Tory disabled-bashing book, the report calls for reforms to this. Predictably, the long-term aim looks to be abolishing the fit note system altogether. Instead, disabled people can seek “advice and support” and that “rapid access” to physio or Talking Therapies, all integrated with the mythical, magical NHS app.

Financial rewards for ‘good’ employers

If giving employers an easy ride for their ableism and discrimination weren’t galling enough, rewarding them for it sure is.

The DWP report advocates providing employers with financial incentives, stating how:

We believe there is a strong case for considering financial support for employers where they are embracing good practice.

‘Good practice’ in this instance seems to mean implementing the very obscure Healthy Working Standard and Workplace Health Provision framework.

Incentives look like:

VIP lane-style contracts. It proposes this in two main ways. Firstly, employers would get favourable procurement scoring for adoption of its ‘healthy working lifecycle’ standard (the framework above). Secondly, the government would reserve contracts specifically for employers “supporting vulnerable or underrepresented groups”.Access to pooled funding. Think a kitty that all employers pay into to finance the ‘Workplace Health Provision’ – that employers adopting its supposed standard can get priority to dip into. Tax relief on investments in workplace health/adjustments.Sick pay rebates. It states how this “could be applied to either statutory or occupational sick pay to encourage greater support to employees”.National Insurance adjustments. For this, it suggests that the government could offer rebates when employers are increasing the “flow of people” into work. Conversely, it suggests surcharges for those increasing the flow “onto welfare”.

So overall, the report is happy for the government to be spending on ill health, just so long as it’s lining the pockets of corporations.

‘Incentives’ for disabled people? More punitive policies from the DWP

Besides the obvious fact the ‘incentivising’ is a fictitious and problematic framing in the first place, what it’s offering to ‘incentivise’ disabled people is also an enormous fucking insult.

While employers get priority government contracts, rebates, and access to funding, the report says that the DWP and government should offer disabled people more punitive measures.

First up, it spells out in no uncertain terms that it’s calling for no increase to Statutory Sick Pay (SSP). Yes, you read that right. In one line it notes how the SSP rate in the UK is “much lower than in many advanced economies” and that “many recent reviews” have recommended increasing it. Then in the other it states:

While we are sympathetic to that, simply increasing SSP is unlikely to drive the level of change needed.

SyMPaThetIC? It might as well have just come out and said chronically ill and disabled people don’t deserve enough to live on and they don’t give a shit what happens to them.

Then it’s onto Occupational Sick Pay (OSP) where it tells us that employers have told them that they:

struggle with a one-size-fits-all policy, and that the incentives are not always well aligned between employers and employees.

It also opines that fragmented data means they don’t currently know if:

absence and return rates are any better when there is higher OSP.

So while it doesn’t know the effect of OSP, it seems to have very clear answers for what the government should do with it. Scratch it off your DWP bingo card, it wants conditionality! Specifically, it states that it wants employers to condition accessing it on engaging:

with support where that is provided.

As any chronically ill and disabled person can tell you, support provided isn’t always beneficial to a person’s health. Sometimes, it can be actively detrimental. Despite this, it wants to link OSP to these so-called ‘stay-in-work’ plans more broadly.

The report isn’t for disabled people, it’s for capitalists

Overall, the recommendations would be a boon to employers getting financial ‘incentives’ for doing basically bugger all. It would be a boon to private healthcare and health insurance companies looking to make an easy buck from employers funneling their employees to their services. It would be a boon for big tech and AI companies the government contracts to make use of its new data hub. And for the government, it’s a greenlight for further callous benefit ‘reforms’.

After all, it’s hard to miss not one, not two, but 22 references in the report to DWP welfare. For one of the government’s key roles, the review wants it to, you guessed it, reform the welfare system. It lays on thick the nonsense paradigm about setting people:

on a path towards detachment and dependency

While it doesn’t offer any specifics on these reforms, it’s obvious the report is more ‘evidence’ to buttress future benefit cuts.

Perhaps none of this is really surprising, when in his foreword, Mayfield, condescending cunt that he clearly is, patronisingly states that:

frustration with work, still less ‘I hate my boss’ syndrome, are not health conditions.

For chronically ill and disabled people then? There’s very little in Mayfield’s report to be happy about.

Featured image via the Canary

By Hannah Sharland

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