Mel Stride will talk this morning to Laura Kuennsberg about spending £730m to rid Britain of its sick note culture. Mel Stride is a decent man, but he seems unable to break free from a campaign that is consistently pinning the blame on scroungers rather than promoting the very good reasons why most of us want to go to work, get paid and earn ourselves a pension.

This morning will be another missed opportunity for the man who heads up the Department of Work and Pensions to explain to the public how work provides pay and dignity , now and into the the future.

Rather than stressing the positive messages we don’t get to hear, how a  Conservative Government  will help  older people get better pensions be confident they will get the care they need in later life, Stride will focus on those who would rather claim than work.

A sick note culture cannot be solved through a capital injection of £730m into tracking down shirkers. My Dad was a GP and spent the last few years of his life doing medical assessments of those who were on the sick – long-term. He found the occasional shirker but he would remind me that people who become sick of work are generally sick of life. Their problems are deep-rooted and cannot be fixed by withdrawing of benefits. He was a pragmatist and he talked frankly with those he assessed. He told me he could not help most, either as a doctor or a politician.

There is nothing glamorous about being long-term sick. It is typically a road to an early death, often hastened by addiction and a breakdown in motivation to get out of bed. I know people who will not return to work in their forties, I do not expect them to make it to my age (62).  Two I can think of, could do with their state pension now as they are unlikely to ever draw on it. Both have paid national insurance and income tax most of their working life.

There is an alternative way to make the work-shy want to return to work and that is to make work the reason to get out of bed. We have a productivity problem and part of that is that many people are under-motivated. We need an incentive to work hard – we need hard work to pay off.

Pensions are one of the reason why work pays and I have heard no one in this election linking the desire to earn a proper pension to productivity. It is an argument waiting to be made.

The vital role of employers in promoting pensions

In a recent podcast, Scottish Widows estimated that one in four workplace savers could be considered “vulnerable”. Scottish Widows have 4m policies and members, even with some double counting , it claims to have a million potentially vulnerable future pensioners on its books.

If we take their book as representative, then 8m of the 32m working population are vulnerable. That’s a lot of potential sick notes. But 11m more people are saving into workplace pensions than at the start of the Conservative’s 14 year run and with the triple lock on the state pension and higher take up of pension credit, retirement is something that people can look forward to. This is very largely down to the work of large and small employers in implementing auto-enrolment and running it properly.

Working with accountants, payroll bureaux and financial advisers, Britain’s 1m + small employers now have a pensions culture that makes going to work not just a way to get paid, but a way to get a better standard of life in retirement. Really good employers like SUEZ are going the extra mile and helping those who work , to save for a rainy day. Many large employers are paying way above the AE minima and while this will not lead to the generous benefit of a DB plan, we should remember that workplace pensions are open to all staff – not just those chosen by an HR department.

The sick-note culture would be a lot worse were it not for great employers. They are part of the solution and better placed  to solve the sick note culture than the DWP.

The causes of (dodgy) sick notes

Those who have given up on work and chosen to rely on benefits need a boot up the bum. No one wants their taxes to pay for malingerers who cheat the system and we do have to pay to root out scroungers.

But the root cause of most dis-satisfaction with work is the perception that work does not pay. For many people work doesn’t pay enough to meet the cost of child and elderly care and we need a benefits system that rewards those whose job is to care. These people are properly drawing benefits. And many people are proper sick and properly rely on the state to provide a safety. But for the rest, the people that Mel Stride is going after, there are two options. Either to persist in what amounts to fraud or to return to work for the right reason- because work pays.

We do so little to promote the value of work, compared with the effort we put into chasing people back to it. “Pension” is the unsung workplace benefit that all workers get. I hope that the next Government does more to promote the value of work and pensions rather than continue to stir up social discontent by playing to the grandstand.