How Do We Make Disability Confident More Credible?

On Monday 4^th March, I met with representatives from the business community, Disabled People’s Organisations, academics and disability charities to discuss the government’s Disability Confident scheme and how we might work to improve it.

The discussion took place in a roundtable format and was very productive, with those attending offering fascinating and practical insights into the realities of Disability Confident.

While there were many useful takeaways, which I have outlined below, the most pertinent was the unanimous agreement that the Disability Confident scheme was not working and was in desperate need of reform. There were calls across the board for a more focused, more ambitious, clearer scheme, with proper backing from the government in terms of funding and monitoring.

The Labour Party is committed to working with and being led by disabled people when it comes to dealing with the issues which affect them most. The discussions from this roundtable will help to inform Labour’s approach to these issues when in government.

Thank you to all who attended. Please see the summarised notes of our discussion below.

Issues with Disability Confident (DC)

Accreditation and Monitoring

• There needs to be more monitoring of the DC scheme. As things stand, it is up to charities and third parties to monitor and check employer’s accreditations, despite DC being a government scheme.
• As any DC validated organisation can approve another’s credentials, employers can essentially ‘shop around’ until they find someone who will confirm their DC credentials even if they are not taking the proper steps to be DC.
• DC needs to be a living, breathing policy – many employers are just getting the badge and then stop progressing.
• DC can be harmful to disabled people looking to enter the workforce, as there is zero guarantee of being treated better. Likewise, employers are concerned about ‘getting it wrong’ despite the DC advice and guidance.
• There is little incentive for employers to take meaningful action beyond getting the badge.

Experience of Work

• There is very little evidence that DC scheme does anything to improve number of disabled people in employment. While there is some effect at levels 2 and 3, there is no effect at level 1.
• Some DC organisations display the badge, but in practice do not act as a DC employer. This can be detrimental to disabled people trying to find employment who are looking specifically at working for a DC employer, particularly young disabled people who may be entering employment for the first time.
• Some employers only try to employ ‘easier to reach’ disabled people, so as to not have to make much of an effort while still complying with DC and employing disabled people.

Success Criteria

• Level 3 of DC is not ambitious or difficult enough – if this scheme is meant to be the gold standard, then it needs to encourage practice which fits with this.
• The current success criteria is far too numbers-driven, which measures how many disabled people are being employed as opposed to more qualitative measures, such as the quality of the work and whether disabled employees feel happy and supported in their work.
• The guidelines and advice need to be improved – they do not currently actually offer enough to show employers how to be truly DC.
• There is a sense that DC is set up to make employers look good and to act as reputational laundering, rather than to actually help and support disabled people in work.
• DC is too focused on procedures in employment rather than on outcomes for disabled people.
• DC is recruitment heavy and operates like a ‘leaky bucket’ – it gets disabled people into work, but then doesn’t help them to stay in work.

Practicality

• There is a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the scheme, which does not work. SMEs and larger organisations should have different expectations of them, in line with their capabilities as employers.
• There needs to be a compromise between being too difficult for smaller employers and not ambitious enough for larger employers.
• 52% of disabled employees want to decrease seniority to improve their work/life balance, but employers decline this because it would impact their stats on pay gap reporting.
• DC relies upon good, understanding, line managers, and while they can be great, other parts of the organisation might not be the same (eg HR) particularly in larger organisations.

Communication and Awareness

• There is not a clear understanding among employers about the different levels and what they mean. Some employers say they are DC but are only level 1 and show no sign of progressing.
• Only 23% of small businesses have heard of DC, 28% thought it was poor (with reference to the Business without barriers paper).
• The IOD found that 51% of businesses had never heard of DC.
• Many employers are not clear on how to access DC. In some ways, DC is actually a better kept secret than the Access to Work scheme.
• DC should communicate things more clearly to employers and to disabled people looking to enter work e.g., what is Level 1? What do the levels mean in practice?

How to improve Disability Confident (DC)

Accreditation and Monitoring

• There needs to be an independent inspection mechanism or body which removes the burden of monitoring accreditations from third parties and ensures that organisations do not just shop around until they find someone who will confirm their DC credentials.
• Level 1 should not have a threshold, but every level beyond this does need to have a clear threshold which, if you do not meet, you lose your accreditation.
• DC needs investment from the government and needs a dedicated team who will work to improve the scheme and not leave the monitoring and accreditation of it with third party organisations.
• In the schemes current format, level one is more or less meaningless. The information and support provided in level 1 should instead be a signifier to commit to DC and would be better offered to all as a pathway to level two (which in effect would then become the new level one).

Experience of Work

• Disabled people with autism are the least likely to be in work and are often isolated from the workforce. We need to ensure that, with the DC focus on numbers, that we also actually tackle the disparities in employment among disabled people as well.
• DC needs to be tailored to the changing nature of work, such as a renewed focus on assistive tech etc.

Success Criteria

• DC should be difficult, and it should take time. It should not necessarily require a lot of money but does need to be taken seriously and require effort and learning on the part of the employer.
• DC should show an overall change of attitude towards employing disabled people and a change of practice in employing disabled people.
• There should be different requirements for different kinds of businesses, but there has to be clear examples of overall progression in terms of improving on DC, and this must be done within a certain timeframe (e.g. 3 years). We cannot have employers just sitting on their DC accreditation without any progression.
• There needs to be an understanding of the diversity within the disabled community. For some disabled people, success through DC will be managing to stay in work by taking on less responsibilities. This can mean not accepting a promotion or decreasing their seniority and pay.
• Rather than a crude measure of the number of disabled workers progressing, Disability Confident should require reporting on the number of instances of so-called ‘job-carving’ or jobs redesigned – beyond reasonable adjustments – in order to help keep disabled people in work.
• The measures of success should be evaluated quantitively – rather than a focus on numbers, look at how disabled people feel in employment and the quality of the jobs and work.
• There needs to be a guarantee of getting something from the scheme – what is guaranteed that employers and employees will get out of it?
• The first rung of the DC ladder must be accessible and open to all who might want to get involved, but the DC ladder needs to be long enough so that the top rung is high up, to demonstrate the ambition of the scheme.
• There were mentions of the previous Two Ticks scheme, which had 5 clear criteria that were meetable, clearer and more focused in scope.

Practicality

• Many SMEs actually outperform larger organisations – SMEs are the best equipped to actually carry out DC measures and should be the priority target of DC.
• Job centres could be brought in to assist along with disability champions and could provide the grassroots support that employers and disabled people need.
• DC should be a smaller, but more credible and focused scheme. The goal of this scheme could be to provide a framework for guidance and advice on how to become a disability confident employer, leaving the means of how you manage to do this up to the employer themselves.
• The government may need to incentivise employers to engage with disabled people if they do not already realise the benefits of doing so.
• There needs to be greater join-up within government departments, DC should be embedded within all departments and the government should be a leader for DC employment.

Communication and Awareness

• We need a Small Businesses Excellence Pathway to showcase good practice and reward small businesses.
• We need to encourage disabled people in DC employment to be role models and to promote the prevalence of disabled people in the workplace so that more disabled people feel like they belong in the workplace. (One attendee gave the example of a company photoshopping women into an advert for working in a warehouse, which resulted in a rise of applications from women as they realised it was somewhere they could work.)
• If there are areas with good practice, then these need to be brought together to discuss their good practice and this needs to be promoted for others to learn from. These localised DC networks could create a local conglomeration effect of good practice and would provide lessons to learn from areas that are succeeding in employing disabled people to then be implemented in areas that are not as successful.
• Details of the DC training should be open to all, not just those on the scheme.
• We need to give employers a positive and more defined role to play in DC so that they feel more engaged and willing to get involved.
• DC should be moved into the body of the HSE – employers are already familiar with this body, and this would set out to employers clearer messaging about nature of scheme.
• All staff, not just line managers, need to be trained in co-produced disability awareness.

List of those invited:

• Vicky Foxcroft MP – Chair
• British Association for Supported Employment (BASE)
• Blind Ambition
• BT
• Business Disability Forum
• Confederation of British Industry (CBI)
• David Forbes Nixon Charitable Foundation (DFN)
• Disability Cornwall
• Disability Rights UK (DRUK)
• Disability Wales – sent apologies
• Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)
• Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People – sent apologies
• Inclusion London
• Inclusion Scotland – sent apologies
• Institute of Directors (IOD)
• Leonard Cheshire
• Parkinson’s UK
• Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)
• Shaw Trust
• Steve Ingham, PageGroup
• Professor Kim Hoque
• Professor James Brown
• Liz Kendall MP
• Ally McGovern MP