Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether she has made an estimate of the number of people on long-term sick leave as of 7 February 2024.

The Department does not hold data on individuals who are currently taking a long-term sickness absence.

However, the Department’s 2019 ‘Health in the Workplace’ publication showed that in the previous 12 months, 1.4m working aged people (aged 16-64) in the UK had a total of 1.8m spells of long term (lasting 4 weeks or more) sickness absences. This analysis uses the cross-sectional Annual Population Survey (APS) January 2018 – December 2018.

The publication can be found here.