At the end of 2024 the government took the controversial decision to overlook the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s recommendation to award compensation to those people represented by the Women Against State Pension Increases (WASPI) campaign.
The WASPI campaign centred on the increase of state pension age for women born in the 1950s, which many thought was unfair, or at least badly communicated. The state retirement age for this grouping was initially age 60 and then later increased to at least age 65 to match male workers.
The rights and wrongs of this decision will be debated in the national media and political circles. Yet there is another, less reported, facet to the debate. That issue relates to healthy life expectancy of both sexes, the continued increase to retirement ages and the rise in ill health absence rates.
Healthy life expectancy
In September 2024 Lord Darzi published his interim report regarding the National Health Service (NHS). The background to this report was a decade of austerity, a global pandemic, employee industrial action and crumbling healthcare infrastructure. Needless to say, the findings of the Darzi report were far from encouraging. One of the many sobering facts was the reduction in “healthy” life expectancy for males and females alike. The report found that;
“the health of the nation has deteriorated…the absolute and
relative proportion of our lives spent in ill-health has increased. As healthy
life expectancy for both men and women has fallen, the gap between the two has
narrowed.”
This rather dramatic fall in healthy life expectancy can be seen in the graph below:
Employer concerns
Yet this issue is more than just a concern for the individual citizen. Indeed, the potential impact on employers is also significant.
The average age for healthy life expectancy for males and females is now just 62 years. Yet the state retirement age for both sexes currently sits at age 67. It follows that greater levels of older worker ill health and absence are now likely to be experienced by employers.
Another challenge relates to recent demographic changes, meaning employers are increasingly reliant on that same pool of older workers to fill some vacancies.
When taken together it is apparent that these issues may well add further pressures to the increases in employee absence rates recorded since the Covid pandemic.
Prevention rather than cure
It follows that the challenges of keeping workers fit, healthy, and (importantly) at work are likely to become even greater in the years ahead. And it should be remembered that better absence management is key to improved worker productivity.
This is a topic we will doubtless return to in our media commentary and events in the year ahead. For more immediate further reading please see this post from November, or speak to a member of the Occupational Health Assessment Ltd team.
About Occupational Health Assessment Ltd – a nationwide occupational health provider
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