Employment
Current situation
Disabled people face disproportionate barriers to employment. Improvement is needed to the schemes that assist Disabled people into work (e.g. Access to Work) and employers are responsible for improving inclusion in their workplaces. The legal duties set out by the Equality Act 2010 (including the implementation of reasonable adjustments) are anticipatory, therefore employers must proactively work to ensure they are delivered.
Key Evidence
The disability employment gap remains stubbornly at just under 30%.
Research by TUC reveals that the current disability pay gap is 17.2%, rising from 16.5% in 2021. This equates to £3,700 a year on average, or free labour for 54 days of the year. The gap is even larger for Disabled women at 35% (over £7,000 a year).
Disabled individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed than their non-Disabled peers. Disabled individuals from a Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) background also face disproportionate barriers to employment - with 10.9% of BME Disabled workers unemployed compared with 2.8% of white non-disabled workers.
Policy Asks
We are calling for the delivery of the 9 key asks in the Disability Employment Charter.
These include:
1. Employment and pay gap reporting.
The government should require all employers with 250+ employees to publish data annually on: the number of disabled people they employ as a proportion of their workforce; their disability pay gap; and the percentage of disabled employees within each pay quartile.
2. Supporting disabled people into employment.
The government should: increase disabled people’s access to employment programmes and apprenticeships; increase the scale, quality and awareness of supported employment programmes and supported internships; and increase the provision of tailored careers advice to disabled people.
3. Reform of Access to Work (AtW).
The government should: remove the AtW support cap; ensure application/renewal processes are efficient, personalised, and flexible; entitle disabled job-seekers to ‘in principle’ indicative awards; facilitate passporting of awards between organisations and from Disabled Student’s Allowance to AtW; and increase awareness of AtW support.
4. Reform of Disability Confident.
The government should: require all employers at Disability Confident Levels 2 and 3 to meet minimum thresholds regarding the percentage of disabled people in their workforce; and remove accreditation from employers that do not move up within 3 years from Level 1 to Levels 2 or 3.
5. Leveraging government procurement.
The government should: ensure award decisions for all public sector contracts take into account the percentage of disabled people in the workforce of tendering organisations; require government contractors to work towards a minimum threshold regarding the percentage of disabled people in their workforce; and take failure to achieve this threshold into account in future contract award decisions.
6. Workplace adjustments.
The government should: require employers to notify employees on decisions regarding reasonable adjustment requests within two weeks; make the option to work flexibly from day one the legal default for all jobs; introduce stronger rights to paid disability leave for assessment, rehabilitation and training; and fund an increase in Statutory Sick Pay to the European average.
7. Working with disabled people and their representatives.
The government should: require employers to consult and negotiate
with disabled people and their representatives on disability equality matters; and provide trade union equality representatives and disability champions with statutory rights to time off to perform their role.
8. Advice and support.
The government should create a ‘one stop shop’ portal to provide information, advice and guidance to employers on recruiting and retaining disabled people, and to disabled people on their employment rights.
9. National progress on disability employment.
The government should take into account increasing disability prevalence in calculating the disability employment gap, and use the ‘prevalence corrected’ employment gap measure in monitoring national progress on disability employment.
Targeted Decision Makers
We continue to work with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on a variety of projects, from challenging benefits proposals to advising on their services. We also deliver training to employers on inclusive employment practices.
Partners and Allies
We work with allies across the board on the Disability Employment Charter. We are also members of the Youth Employment Group and attend an advisory group on Access to Work.
Campaign Action
We co-produced the Disability Employment Charter, which currently has over 120 signatories. We also continue to engage in Government consultations on employment. You can find our response to the mandatory workforce monitoring consultation below.
