Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, 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 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.

The scheme has three levels. To reach Level Three, Disability Confident Leader, an employer must run through a self-assessment of their disabled employment policies and practices, put this self-assessment up for external validation, produce a plan for encouraging and supporting other employers to become Disability Confident, and undertake to use the Voluntary Reporting framework to publicly report on how they support their disabled staff. All of the main Government Departments are now signed up as Disability Confident Leaders including the Ministry of Defence (MOD).

The data regarding the proportion of candidates who declared themselves as having a disability and who applied to MOD under the scheme who were promoted or laterally transferred could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

The table below details the number of staff invited to interview who declared themselves as having a disability and also applied under the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS). Only internal applicants have been included as they are the only staff who can be promoted or laterally transferred.

Notes / Caveats -

• All data is taken from the feed from the recruitment systems used between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2022. The data will only include MOD applications that took place on recruitment systems between these dates.