Ticked Off

[davidgillon]

Not me!

"Ticked Off" is a piece of analysis I've been writng to look into the government's Disability Confident scheme, which has morphed into a replacement for Two Ticks, the much derided (by us) and much abused (by employers) scheme to guarantee the employment and fair treatment of disabled staff.

To illustrate the 'quality' of the new scheme, you can be a 'Disability Confident Leader', the top level, with no disabled employees and an inaccessible workplace. It's extremely poorly written, and very difficult to comprehend all the requirements as a whole, so I set out to dissect it. I ended up with 5,500 words, 16 pages and 6 data tables. I don't think anyone had sat down to do a line by line comparison between Disability Confident, Two Ticks, and the Equality Act 2010 before. But when you do it's clear that Disability Confident is actually a weakening of employer commitments, and only very marginally stronger than existing legal requirements, and in places considers legal requirements optional.

The report is here: Ticked Off

A news article on it from Disability News Service is here. I think John Pring did a really good job of extracting the highlights to give a TLDR version, and it was really surprising to see the Business Disability Forum come through with comments that backed my analysis (that must have turned up at the 11th hour as John had had nothing back from them when we talked late last night).

 

 

Comments

[kaberett]

skimmed; was impressed.

[davidgillon]

Thank you! I'd have been impressed if you'd read the whole thing.

I was seriously contemplating them having made it so confusing as a deliberate strategy to make analysis difficult.

[hilarita]

Heaven forfend that HR get their heads out of their arses and start actually obeying the law on this...

[davidgillon]

Evil Aerospace are a leading multinational, our site was the HQ of a subsidiary with over 1000 employees just on that site and a turnover in the billions.

I had to explain to the newly hired head of Occupational Health what the Disability Discrimination Act said about reasonable adjustments. I know for a fact they then rang up the EHRC disability helpline to confirm I was right, which means HR had no more idea about a law that had been in force for a decade than she did.