asked Her Majesty’s Government how they will respond to the recommendations in Dame Carol Black’s Review of the Health of Britain’s Working Age Population.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I have tabled this Question because I want to draw the House’s attention to the review of the health of the working-age population carried out by Dame Carol Black and published in March. The debate could not be more timely in that the review has potential major implications for the whole question of welfare to work, which is very much in the headlines today, through its emphasis on keeping people off welfare by keeping them in work.

The review sets out three main principles: preventing illness and promoting health and well-being; early intervention for those who develop a health condition; and an improvement in the health of those out of work so that everyone with the potential to work has the support that they need to do so. Dame Carol noted that 175 million working days were lost to sickness absence in 2006, and that estimates by the CBI showed that around 43 per cent of these days are attributable to employees on long-term sickness of 20 days or more. The report focuses on the urgent need for improvements in occupational health and vocational rehabilitation services to provide early intervention in cases of ill health and prevent those off work on sickness grounds from the all-too-common drift into worklessness and dependence on benefits.

An example is given of people off work with back pain; 35 per cent generally return to work within two days, 67 per cent within seven days and 84 per cent by the end of four weeks. However, this still leaves 16 per cent who have not returned to work after a month. After around 40 days off work, the likelihood of a person returning to work diminishes rapidly, making early intervention vital if a person is not, after 24 weeks, to make the transition to incapacity benefit.

As many noble Lords will be aware, incapacity benefit will be replaced for new claimants by the employment and support allowance in October. This benefit will require most claimants to take part in work-related activity—training and work experience, for example—as a condition of receiving benefit. This is a welcome change, which will, I hope, see claimants given impairment-specific support—that is, support attuned to the needs of their particular condition—through the pathways to work scheme, to enable them to move towards work. Relating this to what Dame Carol says, both in preventing people from falling out of work due to ill health and supporting those who have left work and are on incapacity benefit, earlier intervention and greater support are needed to achieve better outcomes.

I turn to some of the specific proposals in Dame Carol’s report. She notes that 40 per cent of organisations have no sickness absence management policy at all, and therefore proposes that a national fit-for-work service is needed to ensure that employers, particularly small and medium-sized employers, have adequate occupational health advice. The service would see a dedicated case manager work with employees in the early stages of sickness absence to ensure that the right mix of support is put in place for them to manage their condition and remain in, or make a return to, work. Dame Carol proposes that the service should be piloted to test out different models of service delivery, potentially giving private and voluntary sector providers opportunities to deliver services under the NHS. The pilots would then need to be evaluated and rolled out across the country if judged successful.

The second main proposal in the report concerns the idea of GPs issuing patients with a fit note instead of signing them off work with a sick note. That mainly focuses on what patients cannot do. Dame Carol proposes reversing this with a system in which the doctor discusses with the patient what work they might be able to do and suggests how a return to work might be achieved.

The Government’s formal response to Dame Carol’s report is not expected until the autumn. However, on 17 March, the right honourable James Purnell, MP, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, made a Statement to the House of Commons welcoming the review and announcing a number of measures designed to respond to its recommendations: an £11 million capital fund to set up six new NHS Plus demonstration sites to look at innovative ways of supporting small and medium-sized businesses with occupational health services, adding to the five demonstration sites established in 2007; an exploration of Dame Carol’s suggestion for a fit-for-work service for people in the early stages of sickness absence; the development of a national strategy on mental health; and improved access to psychological therapy programmes.

Dame Carol makes it clear in her report that much more needs to be done to support those who experience a health condition while in work to retain their employment. The Minister will be aware that the Employment Retention Bill was introduced by the honourable Member for Glasgow North West, John Robertson, in the other place to highlight the need for stronger rights in this area. Each year, around 25,000 people permanently leave work because of ill health and disability. With timely assessment and support, many could have remained in work. RNIB—of which I am chairman, and so declare an interest—has been working with employers to establish the financial benefits of supporting newly disabled employees to remain in work. Lloyds TSB conducted such an exercise and was able to estimate that the net gain from retaining a clerical member of staff is around £2,500; for a senior clerical staff member, this is around £4,500; and for a manager, around £9,000.

However, what is required of an employer in terms of providing assessments and support to newly disabled staff is unclear following a recent Employment Appeal Tribunal decision. In the case of Spence v Intype Libra Ltd, it was ruled that the Disability Discrimination Act does not require employers to undertake an assessment of the needs of staff at risk of losing their job because of a disability or health condition. The Employment Retention Bill seeks to create a right to an assessment for staff at risk of losing their job, and appropriate rehabilitation and training support to enable them to make a return to work. Will the Government support a measure such as the Employment Retention Bill, or include such a provision in their own legislation with a view to clarifying the law in this area?

The welfare reform Green Paper, published today, states that the Government will,

“work with key stakeholder organisations as we develop our commitment to deliver the Independent Living Strategy”.

I take this to mean the commitment to develop a cross-governmental national strategy on employment retention, as set out in the independent living strategy. Can the Minister confirm this, and give a timetable for the development of this strategy, and state how the Government will go about investigating whether initiatives, such as a right to request an employment retention assessment, would be an appropriate way forward?

In April, Health Minister Ivan Lewis announced 11 demonstration projects to,

“pave the way for … trusts to develop their own occupational health services”.

Project funding was to be managed by NHS Plus, a network of NHS occupational health departments across England that aims to increase the availability of occupational health services for small and medium-sized employers. I am pleased to learn from today's Green Paper that the Government are to pilot the fit-for-work service in city strategy areas. This potentially goes considerably wider. However, I would be keen to learn from the Minister how many pilots there will be for testing out different delivery mechanisms, how long they will last and what specific health conditions or disabilities they will cover. This is an important issue because the pilots announced so far do not test the full fit-for-work case-managed service proposed by Dame Carol. All the pilot funding has gone to NHS trusts, so it is not yet clear if or how the different models of partnership delivery proposed in the Black report will be tested. It would be a lost opportunity if the pilots were to focus only on the largest numbers of people at risk of losing their jobs—those who have developed mental health and musculoskeletal problems. While the number of people on benefits with such problems is substantial, it is vital that the pilots also shed light on how to support other groups, such as people experiencing sight loss, as each year 25 per cent of those who begin to lose their sight while in work will leave their employment. If they could be helped to stay in work it would make a considerably greater impact on the employment of visually impaired people than getting them into work for the first time.

Will the Minister also elaborate on the Government’s welcome acceptance of Dame Carol’s suggestion of the fit note, or at any rate the idea that the sick note system needs to be reviewed? The desire for GPs to focus on what work their patients can do rather than what they cannot clearly fits in with a change in focus manifested in the move for new claimants from incapacity benefit to employment and support allowance. However, GPs do not have specialist occupational health training, so there is a question to be asked about whether they are the best people to be making recommendations on work-related issues.

The Minister will know that the access-to-work scheme can provide support for critical job retention assessments when an employee is at risk of losing his job because of disability, leading to implementation of a package of support to enable the employee to retain his employment. In 2007-08 access to work provided grants totalling £62 million to help around 40,000 people to keep or get work. I should say at once how much I welcome today’s announcement of a doubling in the budget for access to work, but can the Minister say how this important scheme will fit in with the fit for work service? There is evidence that it is not as widely known as it should be. It should be promoted and fully integrated as part of the back-to-work services.

In conclusion, the Black report makes an important contribution to the debate on how we stop people who experience ill health and disability while in work losing their jobs and moving on to benefits. Dame Carol suggests a number of innovative policy and service delivery changes that are most welcome. I realise that a formal response is not expected until after the Recess, but I hope that the Minister may give us a further indication of the Government’s thinking and respond to some of my more detailed questions.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, on giving us the opportunity on this of all days to discuss this important report. As he said, today’s debate is particularly timely in view of the Government’s Statement on welfare reform today which, among other things, puts more flesh on some familiar bones from last year’s Welfare Reform Act. It gives us the opportunity to look at the health of not only those out of work but those in employment. Dame Carol has posed some major challenges for the Government as well as for employers, some of which the Government have already welcomed.

Before turning to the proposals in the review, I must express my concerns about the new regime which was the focus of last year’s Welfare Reform Act, and which will start this autumn in earnest when employment and support allowance replaces incapacity benefit for new benefit claimants. By then, the economic downturn will have started seriously to affect the number of unemployed, and it could be the worst possible time for vulnerable people, even with support, to be encouraged to try to find some work rather than claiming benefits. Already the percentage of those claiming unemployment benefit has risen to 2.6 of the working age population, the biggest rise in 16 years. Will employers, when faced with a larger than ever cohort of healthy people who are in the jobs market, be willing to offer employment to those whose health may make their attendance or reliability more unpredictable?

At one point Dame Carol says confidently that jobs are “plentiful” with more than 500,000 unfilled vacancies. I wonder how long that will be true. I hate to sound gloomy, but one has to face up-to-date facts. The review highlights the fact that Britain is not, as some of the tabloids would have us believe, a work-shy nation. By last year, 74 per cent of working age people were recorded as employed—close to a record high. The Government would like to see that figure rise even higher—to 80 per cent—and we on these Benches agree with them, but only if the way this is brought about is sensible, well-managed and well-resourced. Higher employment is good not only for the economy but has also been shown to be good for the general health of the population, and particularly for alleviating child poverty. Even the employment rate for disabled people has shown a welcome rise in the past 10 years from 38 per cent to 48 per cent, but there is a very long way to go to improve that figure.

The review sets out three objectives in the quest for a better vision of work and health in Britain. They are: the prevention of illness and promotion of health and well-being; early intervention in cases of ill health, and an improvement in the health of those unemployed to help them find work. No one can possibly object to those laudable aims, but the key question is how exactly to achieve them when the word “health” spans all kinds of situations from common infections, through all the problems associated with obesity, addictions, the range of mental health disorders, both long and short term, and all the musculoskeletal conditions right through to serious, life-threatening illnesses. There has to be a raft of initiatives for each of the three objectives because one size cannot possibly fit so many different states of health—a nettle that Dame Carol has grasped with a comprehensive and ambitious list of proposals.

She starts by spelling out clearly that good working practices lead to improved financial performance. Although there are many large companies that take the health of their workforce seriously and have strategies in place for helping those who are absent through ill health, many smaller employers do not have any human resource function of any sort, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, relying on informal contacts with absent staff or not keeping in contact at all.

Dame Carol does not exclude those smaller companies from her recommendations, the key one being that every company should have some sort of ill health absence management policy, with the Government piloting a new fit for work service. This ambitious proposal is at the heart of her recommendations and is based, as we have heard, on an early intervention, holistic approach to workplace ill health absence, which aims to look at the whole picture of a person’s life—that is, the biological, psychological and social impact. The rationale of such a service is indisputable. Dame Carol concludes:

“Based on the biosychosocial model, a case-managed, multidisciplinary Fit for Work service would ensure a prompt, holistic assessment of patients’ needs. It would then provide them with an individualised action plan for achieving recovery”.

I believe that the Government have accepted the recommendation to pilot this proposal. The noble Lord, Lord Low, asked some important questions about the pilots and I, too, would like some details. Can the Minister tell us where the pilots will be, who will be able to access them, whether they will cover just some conditions, when they will start, and how much—crucially—they are expected to cost?

Turning now to the other side of the coin—the health of those out of work—Dame Carol cites the huge number of people, 600,000, who move on to incapacity benefits each year, around 28 per cent from jobseeker’s allowance and 55 per cent from work or a period of ill health absence from work. That last figure leads her to the conclusion, which must be right, that more needs to be done to address the health conditions of those sliding on to benefits from work. She emphatically makes the point that the ESA mantra that the focus will be on what people can do rather than what they cannot do is not enough, and she recommends expanding the fit for work service with its holistic approach to cover workless people. This, she suggests, should cover such services as cognitive behavioural therapy, physiotherapy, advice and counselling for wider social problems, such as debt management.

I find that recommendation much more helpful and hopeful for unemployed people than the more punitive-sounding regimes in the previous Welfare Reform Act. As I have said before in this Chamber, Citizens Advice, which is, after all, at the coalface, says that at present employers are very reluctant to employ people with health problems. It sees many people who are dismissed from work while they are off sick, simply on account of their illness.

This brings me to the whole question of those with mental ill-health problems. The cost to business of mental ill-health at work is reckoned to be £25.9 billion, with more than half of that cost being lost productivity among people who turn up for work but do not work effectively, which is now called “presenteeism”. Dame Carol commissioned her own report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists entitled Mental Health and Work, which gave the astonishing figure that 5 million people of working age have a common mental health disorder and just under 1 million have a severe condition. Mental health conditions are now the single biggest cause of absence from work and claims for incapacity benefits. Less than a quarter of people with mental health conditions are in employment, compared with just under half of all disabled people of working age.

Measures to tackle the problem must therefore be given the highest priority. In last year's Welfare Reform Act there was the welcome news that more money is going to be put into training in cognitive behavioural therapies and that there will be quicker access for patients, and from today's Statement we learn that the Government are to set out a national strategy for mental health and employment. That is good news indeed, but how many extra people are training as cognitive behavioural therapists and how long is the average waiting time for a referral from a GP? That is one part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is the attitude of employers. In the royal college's report to Dame Carol, one patient is quoted as saying that he really wanted to apply for a job as a community warden. He said:

“I really wanted the job, but I decided not to apply. I knew I wouldn’t get it. Having a mental health problem is worse than having a criminal record when it comes to getting a job”.

If people with mental health problems finally get a job, they frequently report being denied opportunities for training, promotion or transfer, saying that work colleagues tend to view mental illness as a personal failure. It is interesting that a recent survey of employers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that 61 per cent reported a positive experience of employing people with a history of mental health problems, while only 15 per cent reported a negative experience.

So what are the keys to reducing mental ill-health absence at work? One of Dame Carol's main findings was that work is good for health, but that means that employers, particularly line managers, must be aware of how to treat their workers well; for example, watching out for, and dealing with, bullying; making sure employees do not have unrealistic expectations; and allowing workers to have some control over how they work. It also means allowing the possibility of flexible working for those who are suffering mental distress, ensuring that they have speedy access to psychological therapies and giving them effective rehabilitation after time off work.

I have one minute remaining. Noble Lords will be pleased to hear that this House has a good record as an employer and keeps closely in touch with those who are absent through ill health with a view to helping them to return as appropriate. The Government are one of the biggest employers in the country, so I hope their employment record is as good as that of this House.

Dame Carol has produced a clear blueprint for the way ahead. We welcome it and look forward to the Government's response.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, for enabling this important debate. It is certainly necessary and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, said, it is timely to ask Her Majesty’s Government how they will respond to the recommendations of Dame Carol Black’s incisive review of the health of the working age population.

The report has correctly been highly praised. It looks at these problems through the right end of the telescope. The subjects it raises are an integral part of this country's future and deserve through discussion. It seems that today is the day for such discussion. It was but three hours ago that I stood here across from the Minister while he delivered a Statement on the subject of welfare reform. Noble Lords will be experiencing a sense of déjà vu because Dame Carol Black’s report is a precursor of the Government’s proposals, which were announced to Parliament today, as was the report by David Freud. I do not want to be guilty of repetition for there are other facets of this problem that require our attention. Indeed, if anyone is to be found guilty of repeating what has been said before, it is the Government—I am sure the Minister will forgive my tease—who have that honour because the Statement this afternoon was nearly a straight repetition of the Conservative welfare policy as set out in January.

Notwithstanding today’s Statement, I hope that the Government are still prepared to respond, eventually, to Dame Carol Black’s review. It was published in March and, other than in the Statement today, the Government have yet to give any indication of whether they intend to listen to its findings. Thus, my first question for the Minister is simply: when can we expect a response?

The central intention of Dame Carol Black's report was to examine not only the costs of ill-health and its impact on work, but also the human costs that are often hidden and privately borne. The report noted that:

“Life expectancy and numbers in employment are higher than ever before, yet around 175 million working days were lost to illness in 2006. This represents a significant cost, not only economically, but also in terms of social exclusion”.

The economic impact is enormous. The report cited the fact that:

“The economic costs of sickness absence and worklessness associated with working age ill-health are over £100 billion a year—greater than the current annual budget for the NHS and equivalent to the entire GDP of Portugal”.

That is indeed grave. Yet what is being done about the other impacts of worklessness? What have the Government done to address the very serious problem of social exclusion?

The report suggests a number of measures designed to tackle some of these problems. One of its recommendations is the establishment of robust models for measuring and reporting on the benefits of employer investment in health and well-being. Is that something that the Government will consider? The report advocates business-led health and well-being consultancy services to improve occupational health support. What is the Government’s view on that? This is a pressing problem that will grow in future. Thus, it is important that we hear what the Government will take away from this report and what they plan to continue to ignore.

The report raises a problem of alarming magnitude, that of benefit dependence. We have been focusing on this issue this afternoon. The Minister at times sounded complacent that the problem is reducing. It is not. My figures tell me that there are currently 2.6 million people claiming incapacity benefit. Of those, 1.8 million—nearly 70 per cent—began their claim after 1997. This Government have made more and more people dependent on benefits. This tide must be not only stemmed but reversed. Why has it taken the Government so long to acknowledge that there is a serious and deeply entrenched problem? On this Government’s watch, 1.8 million people started claiming and have failed to get off the benefit because of a constant cycle of ill-conceived and ill-managed reforms. Do the Government now have the courage to agree that over the past 10 years, they have failed to help these people get back to work?

I do not want to present your Lordships’ House with instances of gloom and doom only. There are ways out of the current crisis; indeed, the Statement discussed some of them. We welcomed it because it showed that the Government are finally willing to follow the Conservative lead. We support the proposals for compulsory community work programmes and for independent medical assessments for incapacity benefit claimants. We support these proposals now, just as we supported them when we announced them six months ago. In January, Ministers called our ideas unworkable and uncosted. They are now government policy. Yet in politics, it is important to pursue the best ideas, regardless of origin, and for that I applaud the Government’s courage in such a drastic U-turn.

There is a risk, still. If the problems outlined by Dame Carol Black are to be tackled, there must be support for solutions. Incapacity benefit dependence is a blight where it is not appropriate. If measures to get able people back to work are not implemented with care, consideration and full support, we will continue the cycle of failure. It seems to be another of the Government’s great skills not only to steal Conservative ideas—for which I forgive them—but then to implement them poorly, under-resourced and then watch them discredited. There is too much at risk in this area to allow that to happen.

One measure that is in particular danger of this is the allowance of private sector provision of all programmes to get people back to work. The expertise and dynamism of the volunteer and private sectors must be harnessed properly if we are to see a real transition in the workforce. Half measures will not work. Results must be rewarded fairly. The private sector must be supported properly. Dame Carol Black's report must be taken into account by the Government. The costs are far too high for it to be wholly ignored. I hope that the Minister will address the report's recommendations in some detail in his reply, so that the Government may pursue the noble cause of securing our workforce and putting all able Britons back into work and back on their own two feet.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Low, for calling the debate this evening and for his typically thoughtful speech, as well as for the powerful contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, and the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach. As the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said, on a day when the Government have set out the next stage of their plans for reforming welfare to ensure that no one is written off, it is fitting that we should have this opportunity to discuss the importance of helping people to stay in work or to return to work quickly when health conditions develop.

Arguably, that is both the alpha and the omega of successful welfare reform. It is the alpha because acting to prevent ill health leading to long-term absence is the first line of defence against worklessness and the very best way to reduce the numbers still coming on to incapacity benefits—still some 600,000 a year, more than half of whom are coming from employment. It is the omega because the ultimate ambition of welfare reform is no longer simply to help the workless get back to work but actually to make that return to work sustainable.

That cannot be achieved without a new approach to health and work—the vision set out so clearly by Dame Carol in her review earlier this year. Responding to the challenges that Dame Carol has laid out could not be more important. The economic costs are well documented and have been cited by noble Lords tonight. Sickness absence and worklessness in Britain cost more than £100 billion a year—greater than the current annual budget for the NHS. The human costs are potentially even greater. When an adult is prevented from working because of a health condition, the bottom line is often the impact on his or her family and children. There is clear evidence that families who have no one working are more likely to suffer from persistent low income and poverty.

Persistently low parental incomes do not just lead to children living below the poverty line; they also lead to worse health outcomes for those children. For example, the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among children aged five to 15 in families whose parents have never worked is almost double that of children with parents in low-skilled jobs, and around five times greater than for those with parents in professional occupations.

A separate study published in the British Medical Journal showed that the death rate from all external causes for children of parents classified as “never having worked” or as “long-term unemployed” was 13.1 times that for children of parents who were professionals. We cannot hope to reach our goals of helping a million off incapacity benefits, reaching 80 per cent employment or ending child poverty unless we act together to address these challenges.

As we talk about change today, we should recognise that we would not be within reach of these goals were it not for the progress that we have already made over the past decade or more. Claimant unemployment is near to its lowest level for 30 years. More people are in work than ever before—an increase of more than 3 million compared to 1997. As the noble Baroness highlighted, the current employment rate is more than 74 per cent. There has been an end to the year-on-year increase in the number of people on incapacity benefits, with about 140,000 fewer claimants than at the peak in 2003. Perhaps I will not take the opportunity to joust with the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, about data, which we touched on this afternoon. I simply do not accept that the problem has got worse under this Government. It has got better. We are reducing the number on incapacity benefits. There are more than 400,000 fewer children living in workless households than in 1997.

These changes provide the platform for further progress, and today’s Green Paper takes those next steps. It offers more support in return for more responsibility—a benefit system that rewards responsibility, gives people the incentive to do the right thing, and encourages them to look for work and seek the skills they need for the future. It also ensures that opportunity is available to everyone; it seeks to end the current injustice whereby too many people are written off to a life on benefits and excluded from help to get back to work.

Importantly, it is a set of reforms which puts the support to help people remain in work at the heart of the welfare agenda. That is why we are taking forward Dame Carol’s recommendation to pilot a “fit for work” service, for the first time bringing together health and employment support to help those in the early stages of sickness absence. Both the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, asked about the “fit for work” service. I hope that they will understand that I cannot today give the specific details of our piloting plans, but it is clear that it is intended as a multidisciplinary service precisely because of the multiplicity of factors that take people out of work, not just the most common mental health or musculoskeletal conditions. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, also spoke about the range of conditions that Dame Carol's recommendations should encompass. Dame Carol has made clear that we should not overmedicalise the challenges.

Flexibility and creativity will also be crucial. The pilots will test a variety of approaches to delivery. That is why we have today announced that we will be challenging successful city strategies to develop innovative proposals to run some of the pilots as part of the broader pilot programme for the “fit for work” service.

We have also been working in partnership with healthcare professional and employer representative bodies to develop a reformed statutory medical certificate or “sick note”, consulting on the changes this autumn and intending to introduce the new form during 2009. The noble Lord, Lord Low, rightly emphasised the importance not just of moving towards more of a “fit note” but the wider question of supporting GPs and other healthcare professionals in making recommendations on work-related issues. That is why, as well as reforming the medical certificate, we are also working in partnership with healthcare professional bodies to take forward a programme of work to improve the training and guidance for healthcare professionals in providing advice on fitness for work.

GPs will always be the first port of call for a patient who develops a health condition. With the evidence we now have that work is generally good for health it would be wrong not to support GPs in reflecting this in the advice that they give to their patients. Critically the reforms must be about support for GPs, not placing burdens on them—about helping GPs to give the best possible advice to their patients. The reality is that too often signing a sick note becomes a substitute for treatment. That is not a GP’s fault; too often they do not have any other options.

That is why in taking forward Dame Carol’s recommendations in this area we aim to bring about systemic change—not just a different piece of paper but a radical overhaul of occupational health which provides more support for GPs, employees and employers alike.

That is the ambition of the “fit for work” service. It is why we are supporting the Faculty and Society of Occupational Medicine in working to unite the occupational health profession. It is why, in addition to our existing investment to support the employment and retention of disabled people—including through WORKSTEP, work preparation and the employability programmes—we have today announced that we are doubling the Access to Work budget to help about an extra 25,000 people a year to stay in or get back into work.

That is more support, which a “fit for work” service pilot could draw on in helping someone to stay in or return to work quickly. I agree with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Low, about the need to promote the Access to Work service, as we discussed earlier.

Over the coming months, as part of our commitment to deliver the independent living strategy, we will explore the effectiveness of employee retention assessments in helping disabled people to stay in work, thereby seeking to strike a critical balance between providing the best possible support for employers to make workplace adjustments while ensuring that we do not place unnecessary burdens on businesses, especially smaller ones in which, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, has emphasised, it is particularly important to address the current lack of available occupational health support.

Dame Carol recommended that government should work with employers and representative bodies to develop a robust model for measuring and reporting on the benefits of businesses investing in the health and well-being of their staff, and that employers should use this to report progress to their boards and in company accounts. Earlier this month, we launched a pilot of such a model—Business HealthCheck—in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Business in the Community. More than 250 organisations from across the private and public sectors have already registered to take part in the pilot.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, spoke in particular about mental health. The Government are also committed to improving support for those with mental health conditions. Over the next three years, recurrent funding rising to £173 million has been allocated to improving access to psychological therapies. Further funds will be made available to test the impact of employment support advisers working in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme. The noble Baroness asked me for statistics on the number of therapists in training. I do not have those to hand, but they are available, I am sure, and I will provide her with them.

We will build on this progress over the coming months by setting out a national strategy for mental health and employment. A steering group of eminent specialists, chaired by Dame Carol Black, met for the first time earlier this month and will oversee the development of the strategy. They will be assisted by members with business and third-sector backgrounds to advise on all aspects of mental health and employment. In particular, they will focus on how mental health provision can be better tailored and integrated to help people to find work, to stay in work or to return to work. Taken together, these changes mark a radical step change in the way in which we approach the health of the working-age population. Over the coming months, as we develop the Government’s response to Dame Carol’s review, so we must continue to build on the partnership working that has defined this agenda from the very inception of our health, work and well-being strategy back in 2005. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, asked when we could expect the response. We aim to give it in the autumn. I do not have a precise date, but it will probably be towards the end of October.

Employers, healthcare professionals, unions and individuals—indeed, all those with an interest in the future health of Britain’s working-age population—should be engaged. Our goals are clear: to help more people to enter and remain in work, to establish healthier workplaces as the norm, and to eradicate the remaining legacy of poverty and social deprivation that still too often blights workless families and communities in Britain. It is clear that delivering this vision will be good for Britain and that, quite simply, we will not secure the future health of our nation without it.

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do adjourn during pleasure until 8.31 pm.

Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.

[The Sitting was suspended from 8.13 to 8.31 pm.]