Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what progress he has made on his Department's workstreams arising from the Mayfield Keep Britain Working Review.

After the publication of the Keep Britain Working review, the Department for Health and Social Care, Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Technology, and Department for Work and Pensions launched a “Vanguard phase” co-chaired by Sir Charlie Mayfield and the three Department’s Secretaries of State. During this phase, the programme has been working with volunteer employers, providers and regions across the UK to develop and test the ideas and initiatives in the review, proving what works and building the evidence to support scaling towards general adoption.

The programme has made rapid progress; Vanguard numbers have tripled from 60 to around 220 employers & providers and from 5 to 11 regions. Over the last ten months, Keep Britain Working has run employer led sprints and feedback groups involving a total of 110 Vanguard organisations, alongside delivering workshops, testing, and feedback sessions with over 400 SMEs across England and the devolved nations.

This testing and consultation have led Keep Britain Working to begin developing the UK’s first Workplace Health System that brings together better workplaces, better support and better intelligence to improve outcomes, improve lives and drive growth.

To drive this forward, the programme is in the process of creating of a robust, recognised employer standard with the British Standards Institution (BSI), it has developed a first draft specification for an employer-facing Workplace Health Provision offer, and begun to initiate tests of elements of the workplace health system in regions across England.

Alongside this, the Keeping Britain Working is developing a new approach to gathering Workplace Health Intelligence, to help employers better understand workforce health outcomes. It continues to work with Vanguard employers and providers, Disabled People's Organisations and people with lived experience to test and refine the programme’s approaches to disability inclusion and has begun to clarify its model of shared responsibility. This model recognises that successful work and health outcomes depend on all parties working together to create positive change.