Disability Confident: reform without results?

In conversation with Claire Campbell and Beth Kume-Holland

Claire: There are still far too many barriers preventing disabled people from thriving in work. What do you think are the biggest challenges faced by disabled people when it comes to accessing work?

Beth: It starts before you’ve even applied for a role. Job adverts and application forms are often inaccessible, digital platforms don’t work with assistive technology, and recruitment processes are poorly communicated, leaving candidates unsure how to ask for adjustments. 

Once in a job, many workplaces still fall short on physical and digital accessibility. Buildings, systems and platforms aren’t designed with disabled people in mind, and then there’s the barriers many face simply getting to work on public transport.

Conventional workplace practices, including presenteeism and rigid working patterns, also create unnecessary hurdles. Disabled people frequently have to navigate barriers that have little to do with their ability to do the job.

And finally, a barrier that often gets overlooked: attitudinal barriers remain pervasive. Wrong-headed assumptions about the lives disabled people can lead, the skills we have, or what we can achieve, continue to limit opportunity. Even the most accessible policies and approaches won’t deliver change if these attitudes go unchallenged.

Together, these challenges contribute to a disability employment gap of almost 30% in the UK, holding back a wealth of talented disabled people and impacting individuals, businesses and ultimately all of society.

The Disability Confident scheme was first introduced in 2016 to try to tackle this. For the organisations that you work with, how has the scheme helped them to improve access to work for disabled people and become more inclusive employers?

It has certainly provided a structure to guide progress in an area where employers are often worried about making mistakes. And I’ve seen organisations use the scheme to drive forward some great initiatives – from developing tailored programmes for disabled interns and job seekers, to overhauling recruitment and promotion processes, making things better for everyone. When used proactively it can add some value for individual organisations. 

But overall, the Disability Confident scheme just hasn’t driven the outcomes that we would expect a well-functioning disability inclusion accreditation to produce. Evidence shows that the proportion of the workforce that is disabled is no better in organisations with the highest level of Disability Confident accreditation than it is in non-accredited organisations.

In fact, an organisation can achieve ‘Disability Confident Leader’ status without actually employing a single disabled person – and with far too limited scrutiny of their progress in building an accessible workplace.

There has been pressure for some time to give the scheme more ‘teeth’, but we feel the changes announced at the start of this year still fall short. Do you agree? 

Absolutely. For me, the changes announced in mid-January were welcome moves in themselves, but far too limited in scope to have a tangible impact. 

The main issue is they do nothing to address the lack of clear requirements to actually employ disabled people. And organisations are still able to mark their own homework at the first two levels and then certify at ‘Leader’ status without robust enough external checks on their practices.

That is a core set of weaknesses in the current framework, and it remains uncorrected. 

What changes would you like to have seen made to strengthen its impact?

I’m a big supporter of the ideas laid out in the Disability Employment Charter, an agenda led by Professor Kim Hoque. This includes a core recommendation that to achieve Level 2 or 3 accreditation, an organisation should meet a minimum threshold around the proportion of their workforce that is disabled. 

In combination with the proposed new limit on the length of time an organisation can remain at Level 1 of the scheme, it means lasting involvement would require employment of disabled people.

At the same time, I’d argue for more robust scrutiny of organisation’s self-assessments at Level 2 and an overhaul and strengthening of the external validation process for Level 3. We need to ensure that the support claimed to be in place for disabled employees is properly embedded.

With more robust assessment in place, we would then be able to consider more creatively how progression through the scheme could be incentivised for organisations. 

What more could government do to improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities and long-term health conditions?

It still feels that changes like those announced around the Disability Confident scheme happen to disabled people, rather than being driven with their input and insights. 

Correcting this needs to go beyond the vague sentence included in the government announcement around ‘reflecting the views and voices of disabled people’. Not just because disabled people should obviously have a clear voice in policy debates that impact them so directly, but because it’s a crucial element of understanding the many pain points of current approaches and devising impactful solutions that work.

This goes beyond Disability Confident – it should be a core part of all work and health related policymaking currently underway (including reforms to Access to Work, the Timms Review and the Keep Britain Working agenda).

Far too often, disabled people are framed by this government as a ‘costly problem to be solved’, and a potential source of fiscal savings via cuts to support. In reality, we are a group being held back by the actual costly problem: so many unnecessary accessibility barriers in a world not built with disabled people in mind. 

Ultimately, before anything else, a fundamental shift in this mindset is needed for the government’s efforts in this space to prove effective.