Employment: Disability

(asked on 19th December 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to make the framework for voluntary reporting on disability, mental health and wellbeing a mandatory requirement for Disability Confident Leaders.


This question was answered on 7th January 2020

We announced on 2 November that new Disability Confident (DC) Leaders (Level 3) and Disability Confident Leaders applying for re-accreditation will need to use the voluntary reporting framework (VRF) to publicly report on disability employment. A copy of which is attached. Although there is flexibility in how employers can use the VRF, we expect that most DC Leaders would choose to combine it with their annual report and accounts.

We developed the voluntary reporting framework with a group of employers and disability stakeholders. It is deliberately designed to be flexible, recognising that different employers start in different places. It does not require reporting on pay and we have no current plans to require pay reporting.

Disability Confident leaders are now required to publicly report using the voluntary reporting framework and one of the measures the framework encourages is the number of disabled people employed.

The definition of disability in the voluntary reporting framework is self-declared, asking employees if they ‘consider’ themselves to have a disability. The framework is both voluntary and flexible, designed based on feedback from employers and other stakeholders. If we choose to go further in future, we will look at the case for alignment with the definition of disability in the Equality Act 2010.

We are committed to reducing the disability employment gap, and will report on progress regularly. We will consider the case for a target as part of our work on the new National Disability Strategy which we have committed to publish by the end of 2020.

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