What the standard is
One of the main recommendations of Sir Charlie Mayfield's Keep Britain Working review is a new national accreditation standard for workplace health, the Healthy Working Standard. The idea is simple: set a clear, affordable bar for what good workplace health support looks like, and give employers a recognisable mark for meeting it, in the same way other standards signal quality.
It grows out of what the review calls the healthy working lifecycle, five stages that cover a person's whole time with an employer: recruitment and onboarding, staying healthy in work, being unwell in work, absence and return to work, and exit or re-employment. The standard is meant to describe good practice at each stage.
What it will be judged on
The review is clear that this is about outcomes, not paperwork. Three measures sit at the centre of it:
- Reducing sickness absence - fewer people off, and shorter absences when they happen.
- Improving return-to-work rates - more of the people who do fall out of work actually coming back.
- Increasing disabled people's participation - keeping and supporting more people with health conditions in work.
An employer meeting the standard would be expected to show it is doing something real against those three, not just that it has a policy on file.
What "affordable provision" means
The review is deliberate about cost. It knows that if the bar is set at "hire an occupational health team", most of the country's employers will never reach it, because most people work in firms that cannot afford one. So the standard is being designed around provision that a smaller employer can actually offer: a way to measure how people are doing, simple support routes when something is flagged, and sensible plans for keeping people in work or getting them back. The point is reach, not luxury.
The professional bodies are describing the same shape. The Society of Occupational Medicine's 2026 guidance on WorkWell and Workplace Health Provision sets out a foundational layer delivered by trained, clinically supervised non-clinical professionals, with escalation to specialists when a case needs it, and describes Workplace Health Provision as proposed to be employer-funded. SOM's own figure is that over half of UK employees currently have no access to occupational health at all. That is the gap a provision standard exists to close, and it is why the bar is being set where a small firm can reach it.
When it is happening
The standard is not published yet. It is being shaped during a three-year "Vanguard" phase with roughly 200 employers testing what works. BSI's drafting panel is now in place, a draft for public comment is expected in early 2027, and the voluntary standard is targeted for 2029, with wider adoption after that. So there is time, but the direction is fixed: an affordable, evidence-based workplace health standard is coming, and the employers who find it easy will be the ones already in the habit of measuring and acting.
How a small employer gets ready
You cannot be accredited against a standard that has not been finalised. But everything it will ask for starts from two habits you can build now: measuring how your people are really doing, and keeping a dated record of what you did about it. If you already do those two things, meeting a future standard is a formality. If you do not, it is a scramble.
The quickest first step is to see whether your wellbeing strategy actually runs or is just policies on a shelf. Our free 4-minute Strategy Audit scores it against four components and names your single biggest gap. No call, no card.
On the measurement itself: our free, non-clinical wellbeing pulse, the Intelligent Wellbeing Engine, is the on-ramp that gives a strategy real signal about workload and support as it rolls out. It is the measurement layer, not a separate purchase.
Read next
What is the Workplace Health Intelligence Unit? · Stay-in-work plans · Workplace Health Provision · Return-to-work plans · What absence data employers will track