Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules.

The world is always changing, but sometimes parts of it change uncharacteristically fast.

Take the 1970s. Anyone under 60 has little memory of the economic world before 1973. But in that year, oil prices soared, unemployment started to rise, the Bretton Woods agreement continued unravelling – in short, the rules changed substantially, and forever. Most of us have spent most of our lives in this world.

In the 2020s, it seems arguable that the rules are moving again. The challenge of this era is to manage changing resources constraints. We struggle with an emerging scarcities of human resources, but also scarcities of labour-related resources, such as housing, and possibly of capital. But we also have emerging new abundance in important areas.

Not surprisingly, governments seem reluctant to move away from the thinking that served them pretty well just a decade ago. Most politicians grew up in that world, its strategies seemed to work, and so those politicians are mostly reluctant to drop those strategies now. It’s not just generals who want to fight the last war.

Reining in the 2010s infrastructure spending

A paradigm case of 2010s strategy is the Victorian government’s Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop, an underground railway line through the middle suburbs of Melbourne, for which it currently plans to borrow more than $100 billion dollars. Most urban transport experts say these suburbs don’t warrant such facilities, but the government has stuck to its loopiness even after the departure of the loop’s chief backer, former premier Dan Andrews.

But now rising debt costs mean Victoria’s state Budget is suddenly looking … um, “pressured”. Though it might be too late for the Victorian government to stop now without losing face, it’s increasingly obvious that this project should never have been started.

I’ve written plenty about the Loop project. But the same pattern seems to apply to the energy transition, mostly overseen by an LNP government.

Australia is committed to sharp emissions reductions over the next quarter-century. That means reconfiguring our electricity transmission system. It also means replacing much of our existing energy infrastructure with solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other systems, such as what is called “pumped hydroelectric storage”. In such a system you take water from the bottom of your hydroelectric system and pump it back uphill, using cheap power that might come from people’s rooftops on a sunny day – and run that water back through your hydro plant when it’s needed on an overcast day or a hot night.

If current projects are anything to judge by, the task of replacing Australia’s electricity infrastructure is going to be messy. The example par excellence is what began life as  “Snowy 2.0”, back in the days when “2.0” was the sort of snazzy modern name you gave to a building project to make it seem more sexy.

When Malcolm Turnbull announced this project in 2017, it was a “visionary $2 billion expansion of the iconic Snowy Hydro scheme”. Declared Turnbull: “I am a nation-building Prime Minister and this is a nation-building project.” He might have been less enthusiastic if he’d known the expansion would cost at least $12 billion and take at least 11 years to complete, but those are the latest projections.

Some of this was the normal, well-documented, politically-induced stupidity that surrounds such megaprojects. Some of it was the discovery – apparently completely unexpected, if you can believe it – that parts of the Snowy Mountains are made of quite soft rock. And some it was labour constraints. The case seems strong that this project, too, should simply never have been started.

Australia actually has institutions designed to assess these projects rigorously, but governments keep finding ways to go around them.

• Infrastructure Australia was set up by Kevin Rudd in 2008 to, in the words of Rudd government infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese, “develop a strategic blueprint for the nation’s future infrastructure needs”. It has not so much presided over an orgy of badly-planned infrastructure as been sidelined by it.
• The same is true of Infrastructure Victoria, which Dan Andrews established to “take short-term politics out of infrastructure planning … ensuring Victoria’s immediate and long-term infrastructure needs are identified and prioritised based on objective, transparent analysis and evidence”. Andrews cut Infrastructure Victoria out of the Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop debate by simply making the Loop official government policy, at which point his object infrastructure analysis body was legally unable to look at it any more.

It’s possible that 10 years from now, a chastened Australia will understand better the need to take these institutions seriously.

Australia has also had a really good policy for helping the private sector to make the necessary energy infrastructure decisions here – carbon pricing. But in 2014 we scrapped that policy. And the second-best measures  we turned to were pretty poor (and we dodged most of them anyway). So for the past decade we’ve been stuck in an environment that was likely to produce poor long-term outcomes.

That’s another structure we need to fix. And given the lousy outcomes from second-best solutions, we might want to resurrect carbon pricing again. There’s some evidence that it’s much more popular than it was a decade ago.

Building labour

Consider the problems of building more generally, because that’s one place this new reality seems to be showing up early. Australia right now is trying to build a lot more transport infrastructure and a lot more energy infrastructure, all at the same time, and making bad decisions in both places.

But on top of this, we have realised we need a lot more homes for people. That’s a problem because infrastructure and housing take up closely related sorts of labour – to the point where people talk about the infrastructure boom making it harder to get a house built. (We don’t actually know for sure how true this is. But anecdotally, plenty of builders trying to hire labour believe it’s true.)

This means the next decade is a great time to be an engineer, or an electrician, or a masonry specialist, or a rigger, or a house painter. These are all trades jobs, not the desk jobs which we’ve spent the last 60 years telling people to train for.

We haven’t really thought of Australian trades labour as being in short supply over the past 50 years. But now it is, and it will probably stay that way for at least a little while.

Take a look at the graph below, which signals a developing shortage of young people, and you may see what I mean.

The federal government seems slow to wake up to this. It has put out exciting new targets for the number of homes it wants built. And then … everyone with any command of the resources needed to build these homes has looked at these numbers and smiled sadly, because there’s almost no chance of reaching these figures. Australia literally lacks enough skilled trades workers to build this many homes in this time-frame. And homebuilding isn’t attracting many of the best workers anyway. If you’re in the building trades, you might be awfully tempted to see if you can get a job on a big long-term project such as Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop project, where pay promises to be spectacular.

A training gap

A closely-related problem is the training of building labour.

You might think that Australian governments would be going flat-out to provide the training needed for building jobs. In reality, you don’t hear Anthony Albanese – or any other federal or state minister – going on about this very much. Most politicians devote surprisingly little time to focusing Australia on raising the skills base needed to supply labour for the current level of building. They mostly act as if trades were still low-income jobs, while most of the tradies I know (including some members of my extended family) are doing very nicely, thanks.

TAFE’s shortcomings were well documented in a 2021 review by Peter Shergold and David Gonski. The chart below shows part of the problem.

You might think the building trades are an ideal topic for Albanese, who like other left-wing politicians around the world is trying to stop the former ALP base – working-class men – from drifting off to parties on his right. But if Albanese has made trades a big part of his platform, I haven’t heard about it.

Could someone remind me of the last time a politician said, loudly: “trades jobs are great, and here’s my plan to train a lot more skilled tradies”?

Maybe we can find an AI entity to say it.

Other Australian governments are starting to realise that they’ve mismanaged their cities by locking up large areas of inner and middle suburbia in one-storey houses that are now over-zealously protected by heritage rules. (I live in one such area.) The new NSW Labor government, in particular, now seems committed to easing the regulatory constraints on new home-building close to Sydney.

But it turns out that removing the constraints directly imposed by governments is not enough to solve the short-term problem. Not matter how many homes we plan to build next year, we just don’t have the skilled workers.

Australian building labour and training needs are not really co-ordinated by any institution of note, and it’s possible they should be. Setting up some body isn’t enough, though; it needs to be imbued with real authority, which usually takes time.

Even if we start working harder tomorrow to fix this problem, it will takes many years to solve.

Immigration

All this probably means the current nascent debate about immigration will continue. My instinct is that this debate is now only peripherally about ethnicity (which seems to have been an important element of our 1990s debate). Instead, today’s immigration debate has most of its roots in uncertainty about whether we should prioritise bringing in more labour or housing the people we already have.

This debate has a long way to go, but it is already drawing in some interesting players. The Grattan Institute put out a surprisingly little-noticed report at the end of 2023 arguing that the government should slow overseas student visa applications by raising their price, and limit work visas for both holidaymakers and overseas students who’ve finished their course. (Note that clamping down on overseas students also means reducing Australia’s income from overseas students.)

Capital for governments

The same story may or may not apply to the capital needed to build all this stuff.

Over the 2010s in particular, as the price of capital descended for a while to truly spectacular lows, governments figured out that they could borrow cheaply. And cheap borrowing got them through the COVID crisis too. Indeed, in 2020 the states were egged on by none other than Reserve Bank governor Phil Lowe. He was one of many telling them that interest rates would remain low for years.

But since COVID, real interest rates have been returning to something closer to their long-term norm – and governments are only now starting to notice. They’re borrowing more and more for big projects, getting less and less in return, as rates have risen and risen. (The rate rises killed Lowe’s chances of a second term in the governorship, arguably making him one of the first highest-profile victims of this changing resource picture.)

I’m reluctant to make predictions about the future of capital prices. Chinese investment patterns are changing, and it’s hard to tell what that will mean for the price of money in coming years. But it seems at least possible that the recent boom in western governments’ investment spending won’t end well for all of the players.

Cheap energy

Yet while some resource constraints are growing, some are easing. One case in particular stands out – an important resource which is becoming cheaper. That resource is a particular kind of energy, for which we don’t really yet have a common term, although I bet we will. It’s energy whose customers don’t care when they get it. It’s the energy you’re happy to use just for a few hours in the middle of sunny days. That energy seems likely to become almost costless.

Put aside all the many short-term costs of reconfiguring our electricity grid, mentioned above. We are just not used to thinking about how our economies might change when we sometimes have a lot of energy available for almost nothing in the middle of many (but not all) days. But that’s the world we’re going into – a world full of solar panels that at some times of the day can pump out so much energy that the price goes almost to zero.

You may be tempted to say that such power is not that useful, and you may be right. But we’ve never before lived in a world where this powerful commodity – electricity – varied so much in price. My guess is that we will soon find interesting new uses for that sort of intermittently dirt-cheap power, beyond just running our washing machines at midday.

Of course, cheaper solar makes the bundle of solar and batteries more attractive, which will drive more investment in battery storage technologies. There’s a good chance this will continue to drive a virtuous circle as both technologies keep getting cheaper for some years to come. If that happens, the shape of the energy challenge may eventually change again. Years from now, long after power become radically cheaper for part of the day, storage advances may make it cheap for large parts of the year. I’ll be interested to see what that brings.

Cheap brainpower

The last resource whose availability is changing is probably the most important of all: brainpower. Two trends of the past 30 years come together here: in an astonishingly short time, the rise of a global middle class (made possible largely by western promotion of open global trade) has doubled, tripled, and then quadrupled the quantity of educated minds in the world. Simultaneously, the Internet has allowed us to connect to all of them.

I suspect this is very bad news for parts of the western middle class, whose pay premium is disappearing. But for anyone who can figure out how to take advantage of it, this is very good news indeed.

Time to change mindset

I’m not that sure about any of this. But the recent record does suggest that Australia has been slow to adjust to changing resource constraints. Time to think about change?

Now use the comments to explain what I’m missing, why this is trite, why I’m an idiot, etc. If possible, cite sources.

Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais

Firms remain divided about the value of the office for “office” workers. Some firms think that their employees are more productive when working from home. Others believe that the office is a key place for investing in workers’ skills. In this post, which is based on a recent working paper, we examine whether both sides could be right: Could working in the office facilitate investments in workers’ skills for tomorrow that diminish productivity today?

We examine the impact of proximity to coworkers on workers’ productivity and mentorship in the context of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm. The firm shared data with us on the number of programs engineers write and the text of the feedback they receive on their computer code. As is industry standard, software engineers review one another’s code online prior to deployment. This peer review process not only aids in identifying bugs but also helps teach engineers how to write better code in the future. Thus, this feedback gives us a concrete measure of mentorship.

At the firm, engineers varied in their proximity to one another even before COVID-19. The firm has two buildings on its main engineering campus, several blocks apart. Prior to COVID-19, some teams were assigned desks all in one building, while others spanned the buildings. Desk positions alter team dynamics. When the offices were open, engineers on one-building teams held daily stand-up meetings in person. For engineers on multi-building teams, these meetings usually occurred online. As a result, these teams operated more like remote teams even when the offices were open. To identify the causal effects of proximity, we compare the differences between one- and multi-building teams when the offices were open and the differential changes when the offices were closed.

Effects of Proximity on Mentorship

We find that proximity increases mentorship. While offices were open, engineers on one-building teams received 22 percent more comments on their code than did engineers on multi-building teams, as shown in the left side of the chart below. Once the offices closed and everyone worked remotely, the gap largely disappeared, as seen in the right side of the chart. This feedback reflects mentorship: sitting near teammates primarily affects feedback received by junior engineers and given by engineers who have been at the firm longer.

Engineers Working Together Received More Feedback Than Those on Multi-Building Teams

Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from a Fortune 500 firm covering the period from August 2019 to December 2020.
Notes: The chart shows the online feedback received by engineers on one-building teams and multi-building teams around the COVID-19 office closures (dashed vertical line). Figures reflect raw averages.

Engineers sitting near teammates receive more feedback partly because they ask more follow-up questions. These additional questions and clarifications highlight how face-to-face interaction complements—rather than substitutes for—online communication. Indeed, our analysis of online feedback likely delivers a lower bound on proximity’s total effect on mentorship insofar as physically sitting together also facilitates face-to-face conversation.

We find that having even one distant teammate dampens mentorship between teammates sitting together. These externalities can explain about a third of proximity’s impact. Furthermore, pre-pandemic, when a new teammate was assigned a desk in another building—flipping a one-building team to a multi-building team—feedback among same-building teammates (who predated the new hire) declined, as shown by the red line in the chart below. By contrast, new hires in the same building had no such impact, as shown by the blue line. Accommodating distant teammates by, for example, moving in-person meetings online, has substantial negative effects on even proximate teammates.

Assigning New Hire to Different Building Decreased Feedback among Workers Who Sat Together

Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from a Fortune 500 firm covering the period from August 2019 to December 2020.
Notes: The chart shows the impact of a new hire that converts the team from a one-building team to a multi-building team versus a new hire that does not change the distribution of the team, focusing on the pre-existing relationships between teammates in the same building.

Effects of Proximity on Output, Pay, and Quits

We find, however, that mentorship isn’t free: instead, proximity to coworkers decreases output. Engineers on one-building teams wrote fewer programs than those on multi-building teams while the offices were open, and this differential narrowed once the offices closed. Our estimate suggests that proximity reduces programs written per month by 23 percent. The effects on output are present for both junior and senior engineers but are particularly pronounced for senior engineers, who provide most of the mentoring.

Proximity also affects workers’ career outcomes. Junior workers on one-building teams—who are more focused on building their skills and thus produce less output—were 5 percentage points less likely to receive a pay raise. However, once the offices shut down and mentorship equalized across teams, formerly one-building engineers benefited from the mentorship that they received: they were 7 percentage points more likely to receive a pay raise.

Quits also reflect the impact of proximity. Before COVID-19, quits were relatively rare at this firm. However, with the rise of remote work, quits increased as it became easier to switch to higher-paying Silicon Valley tech firms without relocating from this firm’s East Coast city. Notably, workers who had been trained on one-building teams saw a 1.2 percentage point greater increase in quits, about twice that of engineers trained on multi-building teams. Engineers on one-building teams were more likely to move to roles at firms that offer higher salaries (according to Glassdoor). These results are consistent with the greater training on one-building teams giving engineers the skills they need to secure higher-paying jobs elsewhere. As with pay raises, the effects are larger for women. We do not see the same impacts on firings; while the impacts are not statistically significant, they suggest that workers on one-building teams are less likely to be fired once the offices close.

Who Works in the Office?

Finally, we examine who works at the office versus who works from home. Pre-pandemic, workers’ locations were consistent with the firm placing a high priority on training. Those most involved in mentorship were most likely to be office-based: this was true both for the junior workers receiving the most mentorship and for the senior workers and managers giving the most mentorship. This aligns with national trends in 2022-23, where young workers and older workers are the most likely to have returned to the office, even among those who do not have children. Moreover, when proximity was impossible during the pandemic, the firm moved away from hiring very junior engineers toward hiring workers with more training. While this change could be influenced by many factors, it is consistent with the idea that when the firm faces challenges in facilitating proximity, it decides to “buy” talent instead of “build” it.

Together, these results suggest that there may be a “now versus later” tradeoff when considering the location of work. Working from home may yield short-term gains in output, but this productivity may come at the cost of workers’ long-run skill development. It will be important to analyze whether hybrid work can offer the best of both worlds or whether a tradeoff will remain between short-run output and long-run development.

Natalia Emanuel is a research economist in Equitable Growth Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.

Emma Harrington is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

Amanda Pallais is a professor of economics at Harvard University.

How to cite this post:
Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais, “The Power of Proximity: How Working beside Colleagues Affects Training and Productivity,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, January 18, 2024, https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2024/01/the-power-of-proxi....

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Disclaimer
The views expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author(s).

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The longest strike in NHS history by junior doctors has taken place, with junior doctors in England striking for six days from 7am on Wednesday 3 January until 7am on Tuesday 9 January. The British Medical Association (BMA) are pushing for junior doctors to get a 35% pay rise, which would restore pay to 2008 wages, in line with inflation. There are also concerns over changes to employment contracts which may see extended working hours without compensation which jeopardises both patient safety and the wellbeing of doctors. The strike ended with no progress on pay talks and the junior doctors intending to hold ballots on further strike action.

Junior doctors are qualified medical professionals, working full time while engaged in post-graduate research or further specialist training, and they are crucial in delivering healthcare across the UK – from patient consultations to performing medical procedures and research. They work long hours in demanding conditions, particularly during winter with rising COVID admissions to hospitals across the country, this issue cannot be ignored any longer by the Government.

In the middle of all of this, medical students training to be doctors find themselves uncertain of their future employment. Not only in terms of pay but working conditions, a viable work-life balance, and the impact on mental and physical health.

Last year, it was revealed that some trusts have asked unqualified medical students to step in during strike days, even though their placements in hospitals are meant to be purely educational.

Medical students cannot strike as postgraduate doctors can but are allowed to show support to picket lines, under BMA guidance, and are protected under BMA guidelines if they are asked to do more than is required or to take the place of a junior doctor.

Steve, a final year medical student in Manchester expressed full backing for the strikes: “There is overwhelming support for the strikes – they are fighting for our careers, for better investment in the services and better working conditions.”

Steve explained that the strikes have had an impact on students’ training: “We get more one-on-one with consultants which is great for learning and experience on the wards, but we shouldn't have to get that because our colleagues are on strike", he said, arguing that this demonstrates the existing problems in the NHS.

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Around £2 billion was spent last year by the NHS to cover the costs of the strikes, which included paying for consultants to cover. Critics have argued that the strikes cause chaos in an already chaotic system.

“The argument is that the strikes will cause overcrowding and overflows, but that was already happening before the strikes and will be happening after the strikes end. The service has been damaged for years with a lack of investment across so many areas,” Steve told Byline Times. “I recall being in A&E one night and there were three separate overflow areas – that was before any strike action.”

There are concerns about the future workforce of the NHS about whether or not they will remain in the UK and the NHS. Last year, a survey of 10,400 people from the UK's 44 medical schools found 32% of participants were planning to practise abroad in countries such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia. An exodus of doctors from the service would be dangerous and while there are those that will stay, some would only stay two years (foundational years) before changing careers.

“I completely understand why people want to move abroad. You hear that it is much better in New Zealand, and Australia – from working hours to pay and overall health,” Steve said, “And we’re also probably going to see more people wanting to work in private health rather than public health. We all feel gratitude to the NHS – personally for me, that is why I would still work for them – but gratitude is not enough to sustain a workforce.”

In a written statement sent to Byline Times, Dr Latifa Patel, BMA representative body chair, said: "There have been increasing concerns about doctors, at the start of their careers, deciding to leave the UK and we have seen blatant recruitment campaigns to urge them to do so. However, this survey reveals the very real and worrying trend of doctors making the decision, even before they have qualified, to either practise medicine overseas, leave the NHS or leave the profession altogether. It is disheartening that medical students already recognise the extent to which our profession has been devalued through constant pay erosion and declining working conditions, and have made up their minds, as a result, that the NHS is not the right place for them to work. They are investing seven years of their lives, starting out with the intent to be a doctor in our NHS, only to have that enthusiasm and commitment crushed out of them.  

"The Government cannot continue to turn a blind eye to this increasingly untenable situation. This study clearly shows that increasing medical school places alone is not enough to turn the tide on the growing workforce crisis. It is not too late to fix this, but the power to do so rests with the Government. Retention must be prioritised, and plans must address pay restoration, career progression and working conditions. The Government making a credible offer to our members to reverse 15 years of declining pay must be the starting point." 

When Steve graduates from his university medical degree, he will enter the UK Foundation Programme as an ‘F1’ – a first year foundation trainee doctor.  “The government says that it costs around £300,000 to train us – so why not pay us properly if we are worth so much?” Steve said, “As a medical student, I am incredibly nervous about next year. I can only imagine how stressful it will be for me and my soon-to-be fellow F1s.”

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The tragic suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry a year ago has led to a reckoning for the education sector, and demands for an overhaul of the school inspections system. But now calls for change are moving beyond Ofsted.

A coroner ruled last month December that work-related stress was a contributing factor to the Reading headteacher’s suicide, as Perry's school had just received a negative Ofsted inspection.

Inspections are currently paused until 22 January while the system is reviewed, and a new boss has been appointed. However, Perry’s sister Julia Waters, and mental health and safety campaigners, are calling for an step-change in suicide prevention across all workplaces.

No action was taken by the safety regulator, the Health and Safety Executive, in response to Ruth Perry's death - because suicide is not deemed a “reportable” incident under health and safety law, expert academic Prof Sarah Waters told Byline Times. Prof Sarah Waters, who is not related to Julia, has researched the issue of work-related suicides for over a decade. 

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The Hazards trade union group, which has campaigned on this issue for nearly 20 years, estimates that there are 650 work-related suicides every year in the UK - equating to over 50 suicides linked to work every month. They also estimate that approximately 10% of all suicides are work-related. 

“Many bereaved families experience a deep sense of injustice following a suicide death. The work-related factors that pushed their loved one to such desperate extremes are not taken seriously, no changes are implemented, and no lessons are learnt,” Prof Waters said. 

Campaigners are drawing attention to “dangerous gaps” in the UK regulatory system where work-related suicides are still not recognised, investigated or prevented. 

The UK regulator, the Health and Safety Executive is responsible for ensuring all workplaces are safe and that work-related deaths are prevented. Yet suicides are specifically excluded from its reporting systems, with the regulator noting: “All deaths to workers and nonworkers, with the exception of suicides, must be reported if they arise from a work-related accident  [emphasis added].”  

Suicides typically result in an inquest, which can lead then be referred to HSE or the workplace to implement recommendations. However, this does not happen consistently. 

Julia Waters, sister of Ruth Perry, said in a statement to Byline Times that she was backing efforts to push HSE to investigate suspected work-related suicides, so that “meaningful systemic changes” are introduced to prevent future deaths.

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“The inquest into my sister’s death has shone a spotlight on deep-seated flaws in Ofsted's schools inspection regime. But there is also a wider issue affecting all UK workers and workplaces: under current regulations, suicide is not officially recognised as a work-related death. 

“The Health and Safety Executive is responsible for ensuring that schools, like all other workplaces, are safe. Yet, it does not ask for suicides to be reported and there is no investigation carried out in the aftermath of a suicide death.

"This is a potentially dangerous situation: employers are not required to put any preventative measures in place following a suicide death.  They are not required to make any changes at all in the workplace to prevent future deaths,” Julia Waters said. 

She added that there is no health and safety framework in place to report and monitor work-related suicide cases or to prevent further tragedies from occurring. 

“I fully support the campaign to push the Health & Safety Executive to record and investigate every work-related suicide. We need to ensure that work is safe, that workplace practices are humane and that mental health is safeguarded for every single employee in every single workplace up and down the country. 

“We need a rigorous health and safety system that is fit for purpose and that ensures that no other family has to face the devastation that we have,” Perry’s sister added. 

Prof Sarah Waters added that it was absurd that employers aren’t obliged to report deaths by suicide, investigate their circumstances, or make any changes to workplace practices.

“While work-related stress has become a major public health concern with widespread policy intervention measures, a suicide [following] severe work-related stress is still treated within the UK regulatory system as a private and individual matter with no connections to work,” she said. 

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Recent cases of suicide where work or work pressures have been recognised as a contributory factor include those of firefighters, nurses, doctors, paramedics, construction workers and call-centre workers. 

A forthcoming paper by Australian researchers puts the global figure of suicides relating to workplace difficulties at 10-13%, but suggests the actual numbers are likely to be far higher. The highest proportion of suicides worldwide occurs amongst working-age adults, many of whom are employed at the time of death.

A petition calling on government to introduce a Suicide Prevention Act has just reached 10,000 signatures. The petition includes a specific call for all work-related suicides to be recorded and investigated. For Paul Vittles who organised the petition, such a change is a "no-brainer". The Government is yet to respond but is expected to do so in the coming weeks. 

A HSE spokesperson told Byline Times: “Our thoughts are with everyone who knew Ruth Perry. Suicide is not reportable to us under current regulations. A coroner can refer a case to HSE if they consider there is an ongoing risk to others – that did not happen in this case.”

When asked if they thought the current law was fit for purpose, the spokesperson added that the regulator’s role was not to comment on the law but to enforce it. 

A recent article in the British Medical Journal by former BMA president Martin McKee and Prof Waters provided evidence of at least eight suicide cases where an Ofsted inspection was cited as a factor by an official source (coroner, police enquiry, family statement). 

Update: An earlier version of this piece stated that Ofsted inspections had been paused 'indefinitely'. This was incorrect by the time of publication. They will be resumed on 22 January.

If you have been affected by the issues discussed here, you can call the charity Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

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