Commenting on the proposals, EEF Head of Employment Policy, David Yeandle, said:
“Government should be applauded for grasping the nettle of welfare reform and introducing proposals to help increase the supply of people available for work and take people off benefits. In particular, reforms to the medical certificate system could make a significant difference to enabling employees to return to work.”
However, EEF added that at a “micro” level, individual manufacturers may be apprehensive about taking on people who they felt might not want to be in work and might therefore be “difficult to manage” or might not have the necessary skills or right approach to work. EEF urged government to address this issue by backing reforms with appropriate resources for training, especially for smaller companies with limited resources.
EEF is also working with government on a number of ways in which the “flow” of people moving out of work onto incapacity benefit could be reduced. These include improving the relationship between GPs and employees through reforms of the medical certificate system and ways to facilitate the rehabilitation of sick or injured employees.
ENDS
1. EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation is the representative voice of manufacturing in the UK. The EEF has a growing membership of almost 6,000 companies of all sizes, employing some 900,000 people from every sector of engineering, manufacturing, engineering construction and technology-based industries.