When the UK government announced its national disability strategy in July, it promised to consult on whether to make disability reporting mandatory for employers with 250 or more employees. The consultation paper has now been published and seeks views from employers and employees on the benefits of and barriers to disability workforce reporting.
What happened
The disability employment gap remains high at 28.4%, despite a small decrease over the last eight years. In the national disability strategy announced in July 2021, the government committed to consulting on mandatory disability reporting for large employers. The government takes the view that increased transparency and reporting requirements may help employers build more inclusive workplaces, allowing them to recruit and retain disabled people and tackle the disability employment gap.
The consultation was published on 16 December and asks employers and employees for their views on a number of issues, including:
- The extent to which organisations already collect information on the proportion of disabled employees in their workforces, what that information is, how it is collected and used, whether it is published externally and whether there is a cost associated with collecting data;
- How useful the Department of Work and Pensions disability voluntary reporting framework is and the level of awareness of that framework;
- Whether greater transparency on disability in the workplace leads to more inclusive practices;
- The benefits and risks for employers with 250 or more employees of reporting their disability statistics on either a voluntary or mandatory basis;
- Whether mandatory reporting should adopt a standardised approach, such as the proportion of employees identifying as disabled, and if so what an appropriate question to gather data from employees would be; and
- How far there should be a requirement to publish disability workforce statistics and/ or report them to another organisation, such as the government or a regulatory body.
Next steps
The consultation runs until 25 March 2022. The government has indicated that it will publish a response to consultation by 17 June 2022. This may allow a requirement to report disability statistics to be introduced as part of the Employment Bill that is expected during 2022, should the government decide to make disability reporting mandatory following the consultation exercise.
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