Top Disability Confident members ‘do no better on jobs than non-members’

Employers that have reached the highest level of the government’s flagship disability employment scheme, Disability Confident, are no more likely to employ disabled people than those that have not signed up to the scheme, new research has revealed.

The research* suggests that membership of the scheme often offers little more than “window dressing” that serves to disguise “ongoing disadvantage”.

It also shows that disabled people working for Disability Confident employers do not report better experiences than those working for employers that are not members of the scheme.

The analysis by two members of the Disability@Work group of researchers, Professor Kim Hoque and Professor Nick Bacon, is the latest to cast doubt on the scheme’s impact and credibility.

They say the increase in the number of employers signed up to the scheme – now more than 19,000 – “might be viewed as representing a false impression of progress”.

And they say their results suggest the government should back reforms suggested by the Disability Employment Charter, which is supported by organisations including Disability Rights UK (DR UK),  Spinal Injuries Association, Disability Cornwall, Disability North, Spectrum Centre for Independent Living and Buckinghamshire Disability Service.

The charter says all employers at Disability Confident levels two and three should have to employ a minimum proportion of disabled people.

Disability Confident has faced repeated criticism since its launch in 2013, particularly over concerns that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) scheme is “trivially easy to abuse” and allows employers at the first two of its three levels to describe themselves as “disability confident” without being assessed by an outside organisation, and without employing a single disabled person.

But the new analysis by Hoque and Bacon shows that even disabled people working for employers that have reached the highest of the three levels do not fare better in their jobs than disabled employees working for non-Disability Confident employers.

The analysis shows that the percentage of the workforce who are disabled is no higher within levels one and three than in non-Disability Confident organisations (although the proportions are slightly higher, the differences are not statistically significant).

The percentage is slightly higher in level two organisations, but the difference is still small (4.7 per cent against 4.3 per cent) and it only applies to private sector employers and not those in the public sector.

With level three employers, although there is a higher proportion of disabled people in the workforce of public sector organisations than in non-Disability Confident public sector employers (6.5 per cent against 4.5 per cent), in the private sector there is no difference (4.2 per cent for both level three and non-Disability Confident employers).

The analysis is based on the WorkL database of the work experiences of more than 125,000 UK employees, of whom more than 5,600 are disabled, which was collected between 2021 and 2023.

When it comes to factors such as the control employees have over their jobs, how they feel about whether they are treated fairly, job-related mental health and job satisfaction, there is no difference in the experiences reported by disabled employees in Disability Confident and non-Disability Confident organisations.

And the gaps in these experiences between disabled and non-disabled staff are no smaller in Disability Confident employers than in those not signed up to the scheme.

Among the 16 employers that are members of the government’s elite Disability Confident Business Leaders’ Group, the proportion of the workforce who are disabled is even lower than within non-Disability Confident employers (four per cent versus 4.3 per cent), although the difference is not statistically significant.

Disabled employees’ experiences of working for employers within the business leaders’ group are also no better than those working for non-Disability Confident employers.

In their conclusions, Hoque and Bacon say: “Disabled jobseekers should not assume that Disability Confident organisations are necessarily any more likely than non-Disability Confident organisations to hire and retain them, or provide them with a better experience of work.

“Employment advisers (including at JobCentre Plus) should also be extremely wary of advising disabled people to focus their job search activity on Disability Confident organisations.

“In many instances, Disability Confident certification may represent little more than window-dressing that masks ongoing disadvantage.”

Fazilet Hadi (pictured), DR UK’s head of policy, said: “Many of us have thought for a long time that the Disability Confident scheme is ineffective; this research confirms our suspicions.

“It is not credible that organisations should be allowed to call themselves Disability Confident when they fail to employ increased numbers of disabled employees and when their working conditions are no better than for other employers.

“The UK government has no stated ambition to close the disability employment gap or disability pay gap, so there is nothing driving it to make levers such as Disability Confident more effective.

“The government has also failed to introduce mandatory disability workforce monitoring, which would be another tool to drive greater disability equality in the workplace, despite a consultation process [that ended in April 2022].

“There has been support from shadow Labour ministers to implement key aspects of the Disability Employment Charter, such as a right to flexible working from day one, and a time limit for responses to reasonable adjustment requests.

“In the light of this research they need to add radical reform of Disability Confident to the list.”

A DWP spokesperson said in a statement: “Disability Confident is designed to help businesses think differently about disability and to make positive and productive steps to address the challenges they face.

“Surveys published earlier this year found around two-thirds of employers reported hiring a disabled employee upon joining the scheme with more than four in five reporting they were currently offering workplace adjustments.”

These surveys were part of DWP-commissioned research which showed in September that more than a third of employers who signed up to Disability Confident failed to employ a single disabled person after they joined the scheme.

It also showed that nearly a fifth (19 per cent) of employers with at least 250 employees did not recruit any disabled people after joining the scheme.

DWP has so far failed to explain why the report, which was completed in May 2022, was not published until September 2023, 16 months later.

*Does the Government’s Disability Confident Scheme Improve Disability Employment Outcomes? by Professor Kim Hoque, of King’s Business School, King’s College London, and Professor Nick Bacon, of Bayes Business School, City, University of London

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