DWP Calls for Bids to Employee Health and Welfare Fund
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is actively inviting employers to bid for the Health Work and Well-being Challenge Fund, which will be available over the next two years. DWP Minister Lord McKenzie called upon businesses and local partnerships to put in their bids for the fund aimed at furthering the health and welfare of employees at workplace.
The fund, amounting to millions of pounds, will be allocated to any small and medium-sized business set up which has between one and 249 employees and comes up with viable and effective schemes to improve the working conditions of its employees and promote their welfare. The initiative aims at increasing the awareness among employers that worker satisfaction means higher productivity.
The 4 million pound Health Work and Well-being Challenge Fund will be available until March 2011. The declaration of the creation of the fund was first made in ‘Improving health and work: changing lives,’ in November 2008, following Dame Carol Black’s report on the health condition of workers across the
The grants will be made available through two rounds of funding to winning bids, which will be selected following a review of their projects aimed at furthering better working conditions for employees. This selection will be left to the Local Assessment Panels. A project once selected may garner anywhere between 1,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds per year.
Speaking about the fund, Lord McKenzie pointed out that its primary purpose is to support workers so that they can lead a healthy and happy professional life. He said the DWP is eagerly looking forward to novel ideas from employers to bolster the health and well-being of their workers.
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