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A report for the Council for Work and Health | June 2026

About the Summit

The Work Foundation and Lancaster University convened their annual Work and Health Summit in London on 23 June 2026, bringing together employers, trade unions, policy makers, researchers and health professionals. The half day event, was presented in two chapters, part 1, ‘Sustaining Momentum on Healthier Working Lives’ and part 2 ‘Delivering Healthy, Sustainable Work’, featuring keynote interviews with Sir Charlie Mayfield and Professor Dame Carol Black, panel discussions with voices from the TUC, Federation of Small Businesses, BT, Mind and Jaguar Land Rover, and new research from the Work Foundation and Professor Stavroula Leka.

The Work Foundation’s latest research released on the same day, called Unequal Support: Employer views on Workforce Health in 2026, showed that health related economic inactivity, while stabilising, remains close to record levels. Health-related exits have fallen from one in five in 2024 to 15 per cent in 2025 but economic inactivity due to ill health remains close to record levels. A striking ‘confidence–action gap’ was identified: while 80–85 per cent of employers rate themselves as well-equipped to support employee health, only 39 per cent provide occupational health access, 44 per cent offer line manager training, and just 42 per cent provide paid time off for medical appointments. The gap is widest for smaller employers and those with older, lower-income or ethnic minority-majority workforces.

Sir Charlie Mayfield: The Receiving Environment Must Be Ready

Sir Charlie Mayfield, whose ‘Keeping People Working’ review now underpins the government’s Vanguard programme, argued that getting someone into work is only half the challenge. The workplace they arrive in, its culture, relationships and structures, must be genuinely ready to support them. When it is not, the cost compounds: returning someone to work after a second exit is, he said, “an order of magnitude harder” than the first.

He was direct about the failure of lacking early intervention and employees with no contact from their employer for months. What is needed instead is a structured return-to-work process involving employer, employee and a health professional beginning at day one, not month three. He talked about how line management must be professionalised, not treated as an add-on to a technical role. Managers should not face difficult conversations unsupported and he continues to bring in the theme of rehumanising the employer-employee relationship. He closed with keeping people in and returning them to work is not just a problem to manage, it is one of the biggest untapped economic opportunities available to the UK. Even moving one per cent of the 35 million working population to fuller participation, he argued, would equate to around 230,000 additional workers; the size of a major city, without requiring immigration reform, infrastructure investment or waiting for the next generation.

Professor Dame Carol Black: Honesty About What Has — and Has Not — Changed

Dame Carol Black, whose pioneering review of working-age health was published in 2008, was candid in her interview: “The structural problems I identified are still with us.” Employer engagement with health and wellbeing has grown but largely because it has not depended on political will to sustain it. The system-level changes the country needs have not followed.

Her interview was interesting and to hear her speak so honestly as she reflected on her intentions with the fit note; to replace the sick note with something capturing what people can do, not what they cannot and for it to start the conversation. The gap between intention and reality persists. The system still defaults to defining people by limitation rather than capacity. She contrasted the UK’s “wonderful but disconnected initiatives” with the Scandinavian model, which we can’t forget it took over twenty years to get to its beacon status today, built on shared accountability between employers, government and employees. The UK’s problem, she argued, is not a lack of ideas: it is “a lack of determination to implement” what has already been recommended.

My personal reflections for our members

The overall message from the summit was one of urgency. The evidence base is strong, the policy vehicles are in place, and employer willingness is growing. What is needed now is sustained, coordinated action, with a sharper focus on those currently under-served. It was genuinely reassuring to hear that many small employers are already performing well in this space, often precisely because of their scale, the closeness of their relationships, and the human flexibility that larger organisations can struggle to replicate.

And yet, listening across all the sessions, I found myself noticing two significant gaps in the conversation. I offer them here not as criticism of what was an excellent and substantive summit, but as observations I believe our membership is well placed to speak to.

Where was the employee in all of this?

The conversations throughout focused largely on what employers need to do and what policy makers need to prioritise. All of that is necessary but I noticed something missing: the employee themselves.

We heard a great deal about improving the ‘receiving environment’ and rightly so. But what about preparing the person who is returning? For many people coming back from long-term absence, whether it’s a new diagnosis or challenges managing a chronic illness, something more has happened to them beyond the clinical treatments. There has been an identity shift, the “Who am I now, with this condition? What will returning to work look like, and how will it affect my confidence, my sense of purpose, my place within my team?”

Confidence is a real and often underestimated barrier. The person returning to work may be asking themselves whether they can still do what they did before, whether they are still competent, still capable, still the colleague their team remembers. Then there is connection: the relationships with managers and colleagues that have changed, perhaps frayed, during a period of absence, and that will need to be carefully and actively rebuilt.

Equipping employees with the self-awareness to understand how their needs may have shifted, and how they can adapt and contribute in a new way, is central to preventing what Sir Charlie Mayfield called ‘the second exit.’ A well-supported receiving environment and a well-prepared returning employee are two sides of the same intervention. I would like to see this given far greater prominence in the wider work and health agenda.

What does a supportive workplace actually look like?

The second gap that struck me was this: in all the discussions about good work environments and the professionalisation of line management, I found myself asking, “have we actually defined what we mean? What does a supportive workplace look like in practice? And have we evolved our thinking sufficiently since the foundational work of Waddell and Burton on what constitutes ‘good work’?”

There is no shortage of initiatives, strategies and sector-specific programmes. Many of them are excellent. But there is a risk that the conversation still remains fragmented; a collection of individual efforts, each valuable in isolation, but not yet adding up to a clear, shared picture of what every employer, regardless of size or sector, should be aiming for and be capable of achieving.

I did leave wondering what a baseline standard or a definition of the ‘supportive work environment’ do we have already, one that is ambitious enough to be meaningful but accessible enough that it does not become the preserve of large organisations with dedicated resource and a good story to tell.

My observations here point to the same underlying question: are we being comprehensive enough in how we define the problem and who we include in the solution? The Council for Work and Health is well positioned to support our members and push for both, the employee’s experience of return, and the standard every employer should meet. I hope these reflections prompt thoughts and discussion among our membership.

Mandy Murphy, Deputy Chair for the Council for Work and Health.