Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many companies are signed up to the Disability Confident scheme; and what estimate she has made of the impact that scheme has had on the number of disabled people in employment.

There are currently over 20,000 employers signed up to the Disability Confident scheme, covering over 11m employees.

In November 2018, we published the results of survey research which explored the effect that signing up to the Disability Confident scheme had on recruitment and retention attitudes towards disabled people. The researchers interviewed employers of all sizes, ranging from very small organisations with low levels of staff turnover to large companies employing thousands, and a key finding was that signing up to Disability Confident resulted in half (49%) of employers interviewed taking on at least one disabled member of staff, rising to 66% amongst larger firms. The full report may be viewed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/disability-confident-survey-of-participating-employers.

We will be conducting further research this year, to establish the value added by Disability Confident and explore the behaviours of employers and their recruitment and retention practices. Disability Confident employers have also offered over 60,000 specific work opportunities, which include: work experience, work trials, Apprenticeships, Traineeships, job shadowing, student placements, Sector Based Work Academy Placements as well as job vacancies.

The Government is committed to a goal of seeing a million more disabled people in work in the decade to 2027 and reducing the disability employment gap. In the first three years of the goal (between 2017 and 2020), the number of disabled people in employment increased by 800,000¹. Between 2014 and 2020 the disability employment gap also reduced by 5.2 percentage points.

¹The underlying data behind this figure is currently under review by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and is therefore subject to change.