50
Why preventing long-term sickness in the UK is an economic necessity
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
50 points (96.3% liked)
United Kingdom
4060 readers
76 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That doesn't really line up with new Labour achieving (at the time) record levels of employment, nor does it line up with the data on the amount of people claiming sickness absence: source (ONS)
As you can see, it fell from a rate of 3% in 1997 to 2.2% in 2010. It never increased under Labour.
Now, in fairness, it did drop to 1.8% for the Tories, but once COVID hit, the backlogs created for the NHS (in significant part due to the deterioration of the NHS), we have been unable to bounce back quickly.
The data also shows 184 million days were lost in 1997, which labour got down to 132 million in 2010. It remained stagnant under the Tories, then ramped up after Covid.
Seems to me like Labour were massively successful in reducing sickness leave.
So coming back to this, tbh (to me) that sounds like it could be the usual bashing of benefits "scroungers". The data doesn't back it up, people just thought Labour's generous benefits was making everyone be lazy, facts be damned.