Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to promote awareness of the Access To Work scheme to people eligible to apply.

Over the past 18 months, a considerable amount of work has been undertaken to increase the awareness and take up of the Access to Work Scheme.

Access to Work have delivered in-depth upskilling sessions to a wide variety of internal colleagues, including Work Coaches, Disability Employment Advisers and Employer Advisers. Externally we have also worked with a range of organisations, employers and customer representative groups, providing awareness of Access to Work. We will continue to do this throughout 2022, focusing activities in the areas of the country with the largest disability employment gap.

We frequently promote Access to Work through the Department’s social media channels and have introduced specific Access to Work pages on the JobHelp website (to maximise reach via our Jobhelp TV campaign), and on gov.uk. In addition, we are continuing to promote Access to Work to employers as part of the Disability Confident scheme.