7th Report - Employment support for disabled people: Disability at Work

Key findings

• Disability employment gap stands at 29.7 percentage points (52.8% disabled vs 82.5% non-disabled employment rate) and has flatlined since the pandemic, with disabled people exiting work at twice the rate of non-disabled workers.
• Employers frequently fail to respond to reasonable adjustment requests or delay implementation; TUC survey found 82% of disabled workers waited four months to over a year for adjustments, while UNISON found 11% of requests received no response at all.
• Flexible working—particularly remote working—is highly valued by disabled people but less accessible to them than non-disabled employees; 85% of disabled people surveyed said remote working essential when job-hunting, yet fully remote roles declined from 8.7% to 4.3% of advertised posts since pandemic.
• Workplace inaccessibility across recruitment, physical environment, co-worker attitudes, and absence management policies forces disabled people unnecessarily to rely on individual adjustments rather than systemic workplace design.
• Lack of employer awareness and confidence about legal duties, combined with misconceptions about adjustment costs and widespread stigma and discrimination, creates a 'culture of fear' preventing both disabled job applicants from disclosing and disabled employees from requesting support.

Recommendations

• Government must require employers to respond to reasonable adjustment requests within two weeks, and if refused, provide written explanation of grounds for refusal.
• Require all employers to provide new employees with information about disabled people's workplace rights, support sources, and advocacy resources.
• Commission research into flexible working's impact on productivity and cost-benefit analysis of paid time off for disability-related medical appointments.
• Clarify the nature and detail of Workplace Health Provision (WHP) proposals by year-end, as current proposal lacks sufficient detail.
• Make workplace accessibility an explicit aim of the Healthy Working Lifecycle (HWL) and WHP, not relying on reformed Disability Confident scheme alone.
• Explore alternative funding models for WHP that do not equally burden small employers until benefits are clearly demonstrated; undertake full cost-benefit assessment of WHP versus other disability employment interventions.
• Legislate to require large employers to report on the number of disabled people they employ (mandatory disability workforce reporting).
• Assess how consistently employers define disability and provide further guidance if definitional inconsistency is found.

Key actors

Work and Pensions Committee, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Sir Charlie Mayfield, Debbie Abrahams (Committee Chair), Business Disability Forum, Trades Union Congress (TUC), Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD), Scope