Disability: Employment and Equal Pay

(asked on 17th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Minister for Women and Equalities, what discussions she has had with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on tackling the disability (a) employment and (b) pay gap.


Answered by
Kemi Badenoch Portrait
Kemi Badenoch
President of the Board of Trade
This question was answered on 24th November 2020

I have frequent discussions with the Minister for Disabled People, who has responsibility for these issues.

Pay gaps are caused by a range of factors. To address them, we must ensure that everybody has equal access to opportunities.

We support disabled people to enter employment and stay in work through a range of initiatives such as the Work and Health Programme, Access to Work and Employment Advice in Improving Access to Psychological Therapies services. One of the key transformational elements of Universal Credit is that it provides us with the opportunity to support people who are in work to progress and increase their earnings.

In November 2018, we published a voluntary reporting framework on disability, mental ill health and wellbeing. This is aimed at large employers (with over 250 employees) and it is recommended that they publicly report on the pay and progression of disabled people at regular intervals. The framework can also be used to support smaller employers who are keen to drive greater transparency in their organisation or industry.

The Government will publish a National Strategy for Disabled People which will take into account the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on disabled people. The strategy will focus on the issues that disabled people say affect them the most in all aspects of life, including employment.

More broadly, while our current focus, rightly, is on helping to get people into work, our longer-term ambition, based on clear evidence about the importance of work in tacking poverty, remains to build an economy that gives everyone the opportunity to progress out of low pay.

Baroness Ruby McGregor-Smith is leading a time-limited Commission looking at how DWP, wider Government and employers can best support people to progress out of low pay, especially for those groups more likely to be in persistent low pay, such as disabled workers. The Commission has recently launched a call for evidence to help inform their report, which will be published in the new year: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/call-for-evidence-and-good-practice-on-in-work-progression.

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