THE
LOUD
SPEAKER.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup runs across the United States, Canada and Mexico. England’s Group L fixtures land in UK-friendly evening slots: Croatia on 17 June at 21:00 BST, Ghana on 23 June at 21:00 and Panama on 27 June at 22:00. Scotland fans are less fortunate, with their opener against Haiti at 02:00 BST.

One projection from William Hill, extrapolating from CIPD and ONS data, puts the potential cost to UK productivity at over 650,000 sick days and £1.4 billion. The knockout rounds promise the worst of it, with West Coast US and Mexico fixtures running from midnight to 05:00 BST.

The RSPB is recruiting an Assistant Warden for its Orkney reserves, an archipelago of more than 70 islands off the north coast of Scotland. The successful applicant will look after eight mainland reserves spanning upland moors, peatland, lowland wetlands, meadows and seabird cliffs.

Wildlife surveys, chainsaws, hen harriers and lone working all feature in the job description. The salary is modest, the commute is biblical and the office view is unbeatable. A useful reminder that the most appealing roles are not always in London.

The British holiday parks operator has launched a car salary sacrifice scheme with Tusker, available to staff at head office and across its forest sites from Sherwood to Whinfell. The numbers are quietly remarkable: within a week of launch, 30 per cent of employees had logged in to look at the scheme, with 19 vehicle orders placed almost immediately.

The lesson for HR teams thinking about EVP: a benefit only counts if employees actually engage with it. The four-weekly payroll quirk that often kills these schemes can be solved by choosing the right provider.

Simplyhealth crunched the figures and timed the announcement for Mental Health Awareness Week 2026. The 92nd working day of the year was the moment the UK passed 8,036,364 sick days lost to mental ill health in 2026 alone. Younger workers are carrying a disproportionate share: two in five 18 to 24 year olds have taken time off because of stress-related poor mental health.

The Mental Health UK Burnout Report, published in parallel, found just one in four workers feel mental health is genuinely prioritised in their workplace. Awareness is doing its job. Support is not.

New research from Pregnant Then Screwed, polling 5,245 women between December 2025 and February 2026, lands a serious blow to anyone still describing flexible working as a perk. Refusals of flexible working requests from single parents have risen by 109 per cent. Among parents with a disability, 10 per cent eventually leave work altogether after a refused request.

The headline finding for HR: the way requests are handled has become a major retention risk. When HR leads on clear processes, proper documentation and upfront flexibility, requests stop being a lottery and parents finally get a system they can rely on.

Grant Tickle and Dr Audrey Fleming, writing for the British Safety Council, argue that as AI takes on a larger role in recruitment, the importance of reasonable adjustments has not diminished. If anything, it has grown.

The piece pairs neatly with the Business Disability Forum’s Disability Smart Impact Awards 2026, where smaller organisations such as Curiously Divergent were shortlisted alongside the BBC and KPMG for redesigning recruitment around neurodivergent candidates rather than neurotypical defaults. The shared lesson is bracing in its simplicity: this is not a talent shortage, it is a system design problem. About one in five UK adults has a disability and roughly 70 to 80 per cent of those disabilities are not visible.