I'm a cancer patient. I have to work from hospital during treatment or risk falling into poverty

When Clare Randall was diagnosed with cancer, she needed chemotherapy and a bone marrow stem cell transplant. But the 55-year-old couldn’t afford to take time off work.

The project manager from Dorset was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma for the second time in 2019. But “ridiculously low” statutory sick pay (SSP) – the minimum amount of sick pay employers must pay – meant she couldn’t take time off to heal.

“In between in-patient chemo, I worked weekends so that I could afford ‘days off’,” she recalls. “When I went into hospital for the stem cell transplant, I managed to work for a few days from my hospital bed – the rest of the four weeks I took off on ‘holiday’.”

Sadly, Randall’s story is all too common. According to new analysis by the Centre for Progressive Change (CPC), 250,000 UK workers living with cancer are left struggling to cover essential bills.

Of the 127,000 people of working age diagnosed with cancer each year, 38,000 face a disastrous hit to their income.

“As things go on goes on [people on SSP] can be forced back to work before they are ready, forced to take annual leave as paid holiday, or forced to borrow and get into debt or risk bankruptcy or even homelessness,” the CPC report warns.

They’re calling for an urgent change in the SSP system. For people like Clare Randall, it can’t come soon enough.

“I’d like this unjust system fixed so that no one else has to go through what I did,” she said.

What is statutory sick pay?

Most workers in the UK receive employer sick pay, at full or part of salary. However, an estimated one third of contracted or agency workers get SSP, which at £116.75 per week is the legal minimum employers can offer. It replaces just 17% of income for a worker on an average salary.

The allowance is paid from the fourth consecutive day of illness. Around 1.3 million workers get no sick pay as they fall below the lower earnings limit.

Many of these people may be ineligible for sickness benefits or universal credit, or face delays in accessing them. This is what happened to Tony Pullen, an engineer from Kent.

“Before I was diagnosed with leukaemia, I was doing more than full time work because of financial pressures. I was working every weekend. Then, when I was told I had hairy cell leukaemia, everything came crashing down on me,” he said. “I was an emotional wreck and it was a very, very bad time.”

Alan Barton, an engineer from Sussex, said he was left relying on about £3 per hour.

“On top of all the stress of being told you could be dying, I had to worry if I could provide for my family,” he said.

Barton was diagnosed with stage three cancer bowel cancer in 2023, and had to take four months off initially for the operation and treatment.

“I’ve now left work and I’m getting nothing, not even the state pension, after 40 years of working,” he said.

The CPC has called for various reforms, including increasing statutory sick pay in line with a worker’s wages up to the living wage, making SSP payable from the first day of sickness and abolishing the earnings threshold for SSP.

“Government reforms to ensure employers pay a higher rate of sick pay from day one wouldn’t just be an act of compassion, it is good economic sense,” says Amanda Walters, director of the Safe Sick Pay campaign.

Work last year by WPI Economics found that these reforms to SSP could be achieved at a £4.2bn annual net benefit to businesses, the exchequer and wider economy through improved health, reduced presenteeism (when employees are at work despite being unwell) and productivity gains.

But most of all, it would ease the burden on people who are already suffering from a potentially life-changing diagnosis like cancer.

“I wanted to support this campaign to help anyone like me,” Pullen said. “To show them that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, and we can stop this happening to other people in the future.”