Ahead of the Arc

The All Party Parliamentary Group on Disability has published its report on employment. The report, Ahead of the Arc, offers proposals to help halve the disability employment gap. The Inquiry was launched amid concerns that too much attention was being paid to reducing the benefits bill and not enough attention to helping disabled people participate in the labour market.

The report challenges the Government to develop a new, innovative and multi-dimensional approach combining incentives, persuasion, funding and legislation in six areas of policy all of which influence the creation of opportunity for disabled people. These six areas are:
•    support to create work through self-employment 
•    support to obtain a government business start-up loan or research and development grant
•    support to access relevant advice and mentoring from specialist and mainstream business networks
•    using the large sums of Government money spent in public procurement to deliver a measureable social dividend in terms of closing the disability employment gap
•    turning best practice into common practice in the recruitment and retention of disabled people through knowledge dispersion and scrutiny of disability and disability practice reporting
•    outside the public procurement supply chain:  incentives (such as favourable tax treatment) and regulation (disability reporting) to encourage employers, especially in growth industries, to employ more disabled people.