Parliament has debated making mental health first aid a legal requirement in UK workplaces twice now. It hasn’t passed yet.
But the question for your organisation isn’t whether it will. It’s whether you’re waiting for the law to tell you to do something you already know matters.
The bill in question, introduced by MP Dean Russell, calls for parity between mental health first aid and physical first aid in the workplace. The principle is simple: every organisation is already required to have trained first aiders for physical emergencies. The bill asks why mental health should be treated any differently.
It’s a reasonable question. And the fact that it has been raised twice in Parliament, with growing cross-party support, tells you which way this is heading.
The numbers that should already have your attention
Before we even get to the legislation, the business case for taking mental health seriously at work is not subtle.
A 2022 Deloitte report puts the cost of poor mental health to UK employers at £56 billion a year. That figure comes primarily from three sources: employee absence, presenteeism (people at work but not functioning at full capacity), and turnover. The same report estimates a return of £5 for every £1 invested in staff mental health support.
The Health and Safety Executive estimates that nearly one million workers experiencing work-related stress, depression or anxiety lose an average of 18.6 days a year each. In 2021 and 2022 alone, 17 million working days were lost to poor mental health.
These are not fringe statistics. They are consistent, cross-industry, and they have been growing for decades. Stress, depression and anxiety have been the leading cause of lost working days since the 1990s.
If those numbers don’t move the needle for your organisation, the direction of legislation should.
What the bill actually asks for
The bill doesn’t require every employee to become a mental health professional. It asks for the same basic logic already applied to physical first aid: that trained, visible people exist in the organisation who can recognise when someone is struggling, have a first-response conversation, and connect them to the right support.
The MP behind the bill puts it plainly. Mental health first aiders are not expected to be counsellors or psychologists. Just like a physical first aider is not expected to be a paramedic or surgeon, the role is to be present, to listen, and to signpost.
That framing matters. Because one of the most common reasons the mental health first aider role fails inside organisations is that the people in it don’t understand where their responsibility starts and where it ends. They either hold back out of fear of getting it wrong, or they take on far more than the role was ever designed to carry.
Legislation or not, that is a structural problem that needs solving now.
Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling
Here’s the part I think is worth sitting with, if you’re an HR director or People lead reading this.
Even if the bill passes tomorrow, compliance alone will not fix the problem.
You can train your first aiders, put the certificate on the wall, and still have an organisation where people don’t feel safe to say they’re not okay. The policy can exist. The systems can be in place. And none of it will be used if the culture around it doesn’t give people the confidence to actually reach out.
What the legislation will do, and what it’s already doing by existing as a live debate, is push mental health up the board agenda. It gives HR directors a legitimate lever in conversations with leadership. It reframes mental health from a wellbeing nice-to-have into a governance and risk conversation.
That’s useful. But it’s still only the beginning.
What most organisations are missing
When I go into organisations that have already trained mental health first aiders, I usually find the same things.
The first aiders don’t have clarity on their role within the specific structure of that organisation. They don’t know how they connect to HR, to occupational health, to the EAP, or to line management when something serious comes up. They were trained on the theory. Nobody mapped it to their reality.
The systems that exist, the EAP number in the handbook, the wellbeing portal, the intranet resources, are largely unused because employees either don’t know about them or don’t trust them.
And the first aiders themselves have no ongoing support. Nobody is checking in on them. Nobody is asking how they’re holding up after carrying difficult conversations. The role quietly burns people out, and then organisations wonder why nobody wants to volunteer for it.
These are not problems legislation will solve. They’re problems that require intentional design, not just a training day and a qualification.
What actually works
The organisations I’ve seen get this right have a few things in common.
They treat the training as the start, not the whole job. First aiders leave the course with a clear understanding of the role inside their specific organisation, not just in the abstract. They know who they connect to, what they’re responsible for, and what they’re not.
They have something to fall back on beyond the course. Because the moment a first aider actually needs to use what they’ve learned is often weeks or months after the training ended. Our learner app exists for exactly that gap. When something happens in the workplace and a first aider needs to remember how to open a conversation, what signs to look for, or where to signpost, it’s in their pocket. Not in a workbook they’ve lost.
And the structure around the role is designed, not assumed. Policies and procedures aren’t just written, they’re understood. The first aider role connects clearly to everything else in the organisation, so when something serious comes up, everyone knows what happens next.
The question worth asking before the law asks it for you
The bill may pass this Parliament. It may not. But the direction of travel is clear, and the organisations that are already ahead of it are not waiting for a legal requirement to act. They’re acting because the numbers make sense, because their people are worth it, and because they’ve understood that a trained first aider with no support around them is not a mental health strategy.
If you’re an HR director or People lead and you want an honest conversation about where your organisation actually is on this, and what it would take to close the gap between compliance and something that genuinely works, that’s exactly what we’re here for.
Take a look at how we approach Mental Health First Aid training and bespoke organisational training , or get in touch and we can start from wherever you are.
