Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps they have taken to operate a disability confident scheme for those seeking promotion in their Department; and how many and what proportion of those candidates who declared themselves as having a disability and who applied under the scheme were (a) interviewed and (b) promoted in (i) 2021 and (ii) 2022.

The Department is proud to have achieved Disability Confident Leader status under the Government’s Disability Confident scheme.

The Disability Confident scheme was formally launched by the Department for Work and Pensions in November 2016. It is designed to give employers the skills, techniques and confidence they need to recruit, retain and develop disabled staff.

In the table below we have outlined the overall number of existing Civil Servant candidates who applied for a job advertised either across the Department or across the Civil Service; and whose application was both under the Disability Confident scheme and on promotion within each calendar year.

Please note the question of "Applying for Promotion" is only asked for vacancies which are advertised internally or across Government and therefore no externally advertised vacancies are included in the data set.

For comparison, outcomes for those who applied on promotion but not under the Disability Confident Scheme are as follows: in 2021, 23% were interviewed and 10% were offered a role; in 2022, 19% were interviewed and 7% were offered a role.