Does the Home Office deserve its Disability Confident Leadership status?

This year the Home Office will apply to renew its Disability Confident Leadership status. Accreditation is given to employers who demonstrate that they challenge discriminatory attitudes towards disability, remove barriers to disabled employees and ensure that disabled people “have the opportunities to fulfil their potential and realise their aspirations.”

The Home Office may aspire to these ideals, but our members regularly tell us that they rarely translate to the shopfloor. Ask any PCS rep and they’ll tell you that they’ve dealt with their fair share of cases where managers have outright refused to implement reasonable adjustments or have otherwise made disabled employees feel like a burden on the department, rather than a valued member of the team.

Though the union’s collective memory is replete with such anecdotes, what do the statistics say?

Staff with declared disabilities account for approximately 14% of the department’s workforce, yet disabled staff are over-represented in dismissals and disciplinary cases. The Home Office’s own data tells us that 26.1% of staff dismissed on efficiency grounds in the past decade had a declared disability, meaning that a disabled employee was 2.44 times as likely to be dismissed as a colleague with no disabilities.

If we widen the scope to include all dismissals across the Home Office, the percentage of dismissed staff with declared disabilities has increased year-on-year from 12.86% in 2020 to a staggering 38.55% in 2023.

The inverse is true where promotions and bonuses are concerned. Unsurprisingly, disabled staff are notably under-represented here.

For the period March 2021 – March 2023, disabled staff accounted for approximately 8% of all promotions, meaning that disabled staff were 8.33 times less likely to receive a promotion than staff who do not have a declared disability.

PCS will shortly be writing to the Disability Confident Leadership accreditor to share these findings.