The Keep Britain Working review landed in November and, for anyone working in protection, it confirmed what the data had been signalling for a while. Sickness absence is at a 15-year high, economic inactivity due to poor health is costing the UK £212bn a year, and the government is now outwardly sharing the responsibility with employers. The policy direction is set. What’s less settled is whether the protection industry is moving fast enough to meet it.
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Right now there is a significant gap between what GIP can deliver and what most clients think they’re buying.
Most businesses still think of GIP as a payout mechanism. Something sits dormant in the benefits package, activates when an employee goes off sick long-term, and covers the income replacement cost. That function is real and valuable. The GIP market paid out £633.6m in claims in 2024, with an average claim of £27,206. Nobody is arguing against the safety net. The more interesting question is what happens to all the risk that never becomes a claim, and whether the policy is doing anything about it.
The answer, in most cases, is nothing. And that is where the commercial conversation gets interesting.
A 25-person business where employees take the current UK average of 9.4 sick days a year is losing roughly £28,200 in short-term absence costs alone, before a single long-term claim is ever made. Add the statistical likelihood of one long-term absence per year for a business that size and the total cost of doing nothing reaches £48,935. That number never appears on an invoice. It just erodes margin, disrupts delivery and quietly exhausts the people left holding things together. For every £1 lost to sickness, a prevention-led GIP model returns 48p. That is the number advisers should be putting in front of clients, because it reframes the entire conversation from cost to investment.
Here is what most clients miss: the early support is already there. Early intervention has been part of GIP for years, and MetLife UK has run an early intervention facility provided by HCB Group for well over a decade. Triggering support within the first four weeks of someone showing signs of ill health results in 96 per cent of employees staying in or returning to work. Without it, only 30 per cent do. The issue is that too often someone becoming unwell goes undetected. Employees don’t know the support is there, or don’t flag the issue to their manager until the situation has already escalated.
This is where engagement and data change the equation. Gamification tackles the engagement problem head on. By building healthy habits into something that feels more like a daily experience than a corporate HR initiative, the YuLife app generates sustained engagement that actually moves health outcomes. A 26-month randomised controlled trial with the University of Essex found the gamified group saw a 20 per cent reduction in long-term health risk, 14 per cent fewer high-stress days and a 37 per cent improvement in task focus. Just as importantly, that daily engagement connects the two halves of the product. It keeps employees and employers active in the process, so early signs surface sooner and the early intervention pathway is triggered with MetLife UK before a claim is ever made.
The practical implication for advisers is a set of questions most annual reviews are not asking. Is engagement high enough that people are picked up before absence begins? Is the policy set up to connect employees to clinical support without waiting for a line manager to notice? Can the insurer feed anonymised, population-level health signals back to HR, so emerging risk is visible before it becomes an absence trend?
The industry spent decades perfecting the payout. The real opportunity now is preventing the claim in the first place, by making sure the early support already built into GIP actually reaches people in time. Advisers who lead that conversation aren’t just renewing policies. They’re helping protect the businesses their clients have spent years building, supporting the UK economy while doing so. This is the future of GIP. It’s more than just GIP.
The Prevention Advantage guide is available now. Download it here: https://go.metlife.ly/bKyQ6B
