Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps their Department is taking to support the Disability Confident scheme; how many officials in their Department work directly on supporting that scheme; what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of that work in supporting the (a) recruitment and (b) retention of disabled people in their Department; and what further steps they are taking to support their Department’s recruitment and retention of disabled people.
DWP as part of its Policy portfolio is responsible for the administration of the Disability Confident Scheme – but this answer relates to how DWP as an employer uses and supports Disability Confident. DWP is committed to Disability Confident and back in November 2023 was re-accredited for the next three years as a Disability Confident Leader – the top-level award. In June 2023, 22% of DWP staff indicated that they had a disability (an increase of 3.7% compared to June 2021) and 13.6% of Senior Civil Servants in the department declared a disability (an increase of 1.6% compared to June 2021) – hence support in this space is a departmental priority.
There are no officials working specifically on Disability Confident outside of policy group in DWP – but we do have a Disability Lead working in our Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing team who supported the co-ordination of the evidence.
As part of this submission DWP provided a large amount of evidence on the good practice that is happening with a focus on disability. This included but was not limited to: