Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps they have taken in their Department to operate the Disability Confident employer scheme for those seeking a lateral transfer; and how many and what proportion of candidates who declared themselves as having a disability and who applied under that scheme where (a) interviewed and (b) laterally transferred in (i) 2021 and (ii) 2022.

The Disability Confident scheme was formally launched by the Department for Work and Pensions in November 2016. It is designed to give employers the skills, techniques and confidence they need to recruit, retain and develop disabled staff.

The scheme has 3 levels. To reach Level 3, Disability Confident Leader, an employer must run through a self-assessment of their disabled employment policies and practices, put this self-assessment up for external validation, produce a plan for encouraging and supporting other employers to become Disability Confident, and undertake to use the Voluntary Reporting framework to publicly report on how they support their disabled staff. All of the main Government Departments are now signed up as Disability Confident Leaders.

Disability Confident employers must commit to offering an interview to disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for the job. The aim of this commitment is to encourage positive action, encouraging disabled people to apply for jobs and provide an opportunity to demonstrate their skills, talent and abilities at the interview stage.

By offering an interview to an applicant who declares they have a disability this does not mean that all disabled people are entitled to an interview. They must meet the minimum criteria (sometimes otherwise described, for example sometimes shown as “desirable skills”) for a job as defined by the employer.

The Disability Confident scheme notes that there may be occasions where it is not practicable or appropriate to interview all disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for the job. In certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. In these circumstances the employer could select the candidates who best meet the minimum criteria for the job rather than all of those that meet the minimum criteria, as they would do for non-disabled applicants.

Although this is the standard set out in the Disability Confident scheme, as the Civil Service aspires to be the UK’s most inclusive employer, we ask that Departments should, where possible, offer an interview to all disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for the job, in all their recruitment campaigns.

When deciding minimum criteria, consideration should be given to both essential job criteria and minimum performance standards in those criteria. We set the minimum criteria according to the role and the skills required.

Please find below the data regarding candidates who applied under the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) in 2021:

Please note the following:

• The number of candidates identified as disabled will be dependent upon candidates self-declaring during their registration and application
• We are redacting the data for 2022 due to the number of campaigns with ongoing recruitment activity that would result in incomplete, and therefore inaccurate data, being presented for 2022
• Candidates applying on promotion or laterally are only captured for campaigns advertised internally or across-government. Therefore, there will be a number of internal or other government department candidates, who we cannot identify as applying on promotion or level transfer when the campaign was advertised externally