Greetings from a snowbound blogger, and I do hope the weather is not causing you too many problems.

On Friday I posted the first of my thoughts on last weeks official Government response to the Sickness Absence Review (SAR). For those that missed that post, or would like to refresh their memory, that post can be viewed here:

https://www.jelfgroup.com/blog/?p=2069

During the next few days I will add comment on some of the other issues that are relevant (directly or otherwise) to employee benefits.

And the first topic that I want to pick up is this one:

“The introduction of a new job-brokering service to help long term sick employees find new work (where appropriate) before they fall onto the benefits system”

The concept was quite simple. Sometimes an ill employee wants to return to work, and the employer also wants this, but the nature of the work involved precludes this possibility. So for the sake of an easy analogy, a builder with a serious muscular injury is unlikely to be able to continue as a builder. If the employer has no other suitable job for that individual, the proposal was that a specialist state-established job broker would step-in to find a suitable alternative employer.

All very logical and laudable, but as I said in several events last year, probably not workable. Aside from some potential positive discrimination issues (one for the Employment Lawyers rather than me that one), it’s still very much an employer’s job-market at the moment. In the current economic climate, organisations can pretty much take their pick of both employees and employment agencies. Given this, I always struggled to see how this service would gain a foothold in the market, or secure many appointments for it’s candidates.

So what is the Government’s view on this?

Appendix 1 of last week’s report says:

“The Government partly accepts the recommendation.”

And the detail of the document highlights that employees in this position will instead be “signposted” towards Universal Josmatch, a free Internet job-matching service launched in November 2012 by a well known on-line recruiter.

The more I look at the detail of this, the more that it becomes apparent that the Government are only paying lip-service to this recommendation. Universal Jobsmatch is open to anyone, and it appears to be the same system for all, so it’s difficult to see what extra value is being added to the Sickness Absence debate here.

So, as far as I can tell, this is one recommendation of the report that looks destined to go no further.

More on the SAR to follow on this blog.

Best regards

Steve