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A consultation on requiring large employers to report on workplace disability issues has been published.

As presaged in the July 2021 publication of the National Disability Strategy, the consultation explores the issues around workforce reporting on disability – both voluntary and mandatory – for large employers (250+ employees). The consultation states that: ‘reporting on disability within a workforce has the potential to provide an important baseline from which employers can assess the impact of their inclusive practices on the recruitment and retention of disabled people. How we establish this baseline, however, requires careful consideration’.

Among the issues on which the consultation is seeking views are the following:

• the extent to which organisations already collect information on the proportion of disabled employees in their workforces, what that information is, how it is collected and used, whether it is published externally and whether there is a cost associated with collecting data
• how useful the DWP disability voluntary reporting framework is and the level of awareness of that framework
• whether greater transparency on disability in the workplace leads to more inclusive practices
• whether mandatory reporting should adopt a standardised approach, such as the proportion of employees identifying as disabled, and if so what an appropriate question to gather data from employees would be
• how far there should be a requirement to publish disability workforce statistics and/or report them to another organisation, such as the government or a regulatory body

Responses were due by 25 March 2022 but this deadline has been extended to 8 April 2022.