• Civil Service governance
• Accountability
• Diversity
  • Achieving a diverse Civil Service
  • Diversity Champions Network
  • Monitoring diversity
  • Public equality duties
  • Tackling harassment and bullying
  • Disability consultation
    • Disability report
  • Ethnicity re-survey
• Statistics
• Public bodies
• Public appointments
• Nationality requirements
• Government communications

Home About the Civil Service Diversity Disability Consultation report

About the Civil Service

Civil Service Disability consultation

Report on the outcome of the Disability Consultation

Executive summary

This section provides a summary of the main outcomes from the consultation.

• There were 80 responses in total, giving wide coverage from most of the Civil Service.
• There were 75 responses from civil servants, 93.8 per cent, and five, 6.2 per cent, from people who were not civil servants.
• Twenty-two respondents, 27.5 per cent, were members of the Disability Working Group.
• Out of the 80 respondents, 64, some 80.0 per cent, agreed that the percentage of disabled staff should be calculated as the percentage of those staff who have made a valid response, not as a percentage of all staff, as at present. This change is carried and will be implemented.
• Out of the 80 respondents, 70, around 87.5 per cent, agreed that Mandate and other aggregated data returns, collected by Cabinet Office, should only collect data on a yes/no basis for disability, i.e. disabled person/non disabled person. This change is carried and will be implemented.
• Among the 70 respondents who agreed Cabinet Office should only collect data on a yes/no basis, there was a fairly even split across the three options, for departmental collection. For the Mandate specification there were 45.7 per cent in favour, for information on reasonable adjustments there were 65.7 per cent in favour and for an alternative set of categories, or approach to monitoring, such as the social model, there were 45.7 per cent in favour, (NB These responses were not mutually exclusive). The lack of a clear overall preference is likely to be indicative of the range of practices in operation across the Civil Service. Bearing this in mind there will be two additional pieces of work that Cabinet Office and the Disability Working Group will need to undertake:
  1. Cabinet Office will work on the practical details of how a social model would operate in practice.
  2. Cabinet Office will produce a toolkit to promote best practice in the different methods of disability data collection and monitoring.
• When asked about re-surveying on a frequent basis, 79 respondents, some 98.8 per cent, agreed that this should be carried out. Of these 79 respondents 48.1 per cent favoured annual re-surveying, followed by every two years, favoured by 30.4 per cent.
• In total, 77.5 per cent of the 80 respondents agreed that disability monitoring should be carried out at least every two years. This shows a high degree of willingness from departments to ensure that their data on disabled staff is kept as up to date as possible.
• Among the other 22.5 per cent of respondents there was some indication of a preference for using e-HR and employee self-assessment for ensuring that data on disabled staff was kept up to date.

On the basis of these responses Cabinet Office recommends the following frequency of monitoring:

That departments and agencies should aim to update their data on disabled staff at least every two years, either through re-surveys or the effective use of e-HR systems and employee self assessment.

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