Women and Equalities Committee
Oral evidence: Equality at work: flexible working and disability, HC 177
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 September 2026.
Members present: Christine Jardine (Chair); Dame Nia Griffith; Kim Leadbeater; Kevin McKenna; Rachel Taylor.
Questions 42-75
Witnesses
I: Dr Paula Holland, Senior Lecturer in Public Health, Lancaster University; Professor Heejung Chung, Director, King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, King’s College London; Professor Jane Parry, Professor of Work and Employment and Co-director of the Work Futures Research Centre, University of Southampton; and Professor Daniel Wheatley, Director of the Work Inclusivity Research Centre, University of Birmingham.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Dr Paula Holland [FWD0028]
Professor Heejung Chung [FWD0077]
Professor Jane Parry [FWD0096]
Professor Daniel Wheatley [FWD0031]
Witnesses: Dr Paula Holland, Professor Heejung Chung, Professor Jane Parry and Professor Daniel Wheatley.
Q42 Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Women and Equalities Committee on flexible working. I am Christine Jardine and I am chairing while we choose a new permanent Chair of the Committee. Could I ask you all to briefly tell us who you are?
Dr Holland: I am Paula Holland, senior lecturer in public health at Lancaster University.
Professor Chung: I am Heejung Chung, professor of work and employment at King’s College London and the director of the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership.
Professor Parry: I am Jane Parry, professor of work and employment at Southampton Business School and co-director of the Work Futures Research Centre at Southampton University.
Professor Wheatley: I am Daniel Wheatley, professor of work and wellbeing at the University of Birmingham and director of the Work Inclusivity Research Centre.
Q43 Chair: Let us start by looking at flexible working and its potential impact on the disability employment gap. If I could start with Professor Chung, to what extent could strengthening policies on access to flexible working arrangements increase employment opportunities for disabled people and narrow the disability employment gap?
Professor Chung: There has been some debate around the gap that there is in terms of disability. Obviously, disability definitions are different depending on how you define it and how people identify. However, it is really important to look into. I am going to talk a little bit about the studies that we conducted, which are quite recent and very much a work in progress—you will be the first people to get to hear about them. I will also draw from some of the other studies I conducted using longitudinal panel data, which really tease out the causality of some of these aspects from mothers.
Mothers and disabled workers are very similar in the sense that they have caring responsibilities: mothers for someone other than themselves and disabled workers for themselves. When we looked at the UK household panel, we found that across time, when women have children, they drop out of the labour market or move part time, and that with access to flexible working, that likelihood significantly reduces. The likelihood of going into part time reduces by half with access to flexible working.
In a study with Baowen Xue at UCL, Professor Anne McMunn and myself, we also did that with disabled workers but the other way around, looking at whether disabled workers’ access to flexible working and use of flexible working can reduce their likelihood of dropping out of the labour market. What we found is that flexibility at work, maybe remote working, flexible schedules and term-time or part-time working, all help to reduce their likelihood of dropping out of the labour market.
But more importantly, one of the things we must take into consideration is how flexible working can also help workers to not be disabled. We are talking about wellbeing outcomes. In another recent study I conducted with Constance Beaufils at Inserm in France, we found, again using UK household panel data, that when people go into health shocks—we are talking strokes, heart attacks or other kinds of major health shocks—they obviously come out of employment and work fewer hours, but they also become disabled and end up with long-term illnesses.
In terms of the efficacy there, we found that when people have flexible working they are less likely to drop out of the labour market, but they are also less likely to become disabled or get a long-term illness. So flexible working not only helps disabled workers to stay in employment or maybe access employment, it also helps workers who potentially might be disabled to not be disabled. There is a kind of dual process that we have to consider. Obviously, this is something that we might go into a bit later, but access to flexible working is still quite limited for disabled workers.
If we control for occupation, sector, education, region and all sorts of other things, there is almost no difference. But once we take those away—because we know that disabled workers are not in the same occupations, nor do they have the same working hours or opportunities in the labour market as able-bodied workers—we see that the likelihood of access is actually lower. There is a real gap there that we need to address.
Q44 Chair: Why do you think the wide availability of remote and hybrid working since the covid-19 pandemic has not yet had an impact on that disability gap?
Professor Chung: We have to look a bit closer at whether there has been. One of the things that we found, at least for ethnic minority workers versus white workers, is that there was a bigger gap in the access and use of working from home pre-pandemic, and that gap has declined somewhat, with the exception of certain groups of workers. We need to look a little more closely for disabled workers, but we could potentially see, when we do not take occupation and sectors into account, that disabled workers will have less access. It is because a lot of disabled workers just do not have access to those types of jobs with remote working, because of the type of work—mostly knowledge work—that is being done.
When we talk about the sectors and occupations that disabled workers are over-represented in—which is never the top, let’s say, four occupations, which is where most of the remote and hybrid working usually is—it is very important, when we have this discussion, to see what is happening in other countries. One thing to say is that remote and hybrid working is obviously just one type of flexible working; there is a whole range of different things.
Some of the policies that have possibly the highest efficacy in terms of supporting workers include flexible schedules, as well as term-time work and part-time working. You see in a lot of northern European countries a much higher prevalence of flexible working. That is not just because the type of jobs that they do are more likely to have flexibility; it is more because of their collective bargaining processes, the workers’ power, their negotiation power and unions being able to negotiate some of these flexibilities for the collective rather than individual. We can go into how important it is to have this as a universal, collective thing, rather than you and me making a little deal where I get to work flexibly.
There is also the fact that there is a huge amount of trust in workers to be able to do their jobs. We anticipate—again, drawing from our work on mothers and also ethnic minority workers—that employers inevitably will have a perhaps unconscious bias towards disabled workers and a bit of a distrust as to whether they will be able to efficiently carry out their work when they are working flexibly. That is probably one of the big reasons.
We have heard from researchers who are doing a lot of qualitative work on this that it is one of the barriers to having real access to flexi-work, despite the legislative changes we have seen.
Chair: Dr Holland?
Dr Holland: You are asking in particular about remote and hybrid. I led the inclusive remote and hybrid working study funded by the Nuffield Foundation. We surveyed more than 1,200 disabled remote and hybrid workers. Only 19 of the 1,200 said that they wanted to go back to the office full time. Most of them said that being able to work remotely and in a hybrid way had a huge positive impact on their health and wellbeing, work-life balance, productivity, teamwork, communication at work and so on. Seventy-two per cent said that if they had been able to work remotely or in a hybrid way in their previous job, they could have kept it. Disabled people, particularly before the pandemic, were getting pushed out of the labour market because they could not work in a remote or hybrid way. Eighty-five per cent said that access to remote and hybrid would be essential or very important if they were looking for a new job, and 79% just would not look for a job that did not have a remote option.
We can see that there is a real demand for remote and hybrid working, but unfortunately, we have seen a real drop in those vacancies. We analysed job vacancy data from Adzuna and we found that, since the pandemic, the availability of fully remote roles has halved and the rapid growth in hybrid roles has stalled. We have major regional inequities in access to hybrid roles, where the lowest rates are in the areas of highest need—areas with the highest rates of health-related inactivity. You have this ridiculous situation at the moment where you have high demand and low availability.
The industrial strategy would be helpful here, because it could work to increase the stock of different types of flexible roles. My argument is that there needs to be a particular focus on groups and regions where the demand and need is greater. For example, if you look at it by region, northern England, Scotland and Wales have larger disability employment gaps than the rest of the UK. Disabled people have less access to flexible working in SMEs than they do in large organisations. Of course, most people are employed in SMEs. Disabled people with few or no qualifications have less access to flexible working than those with a degree. There are specific areas that the industrial strategy can focus on.
Chair: Professor Parry or Professor Wheatley, do you have anything to add to that?
Professor Wheatley: Paula has alluded to elements of this, but part of the reason why it has not impacted on the employment gap is because of the types of arrangement available. Hybrid work is much more common than fully remote work. Fully remote work is much more common in SMEs and, as Paula said, SMEs are less likely to employ disabled people, for a number of reasons. One of the drivers of that is the way in which organisations are offering these arrangements currently, and also the pushback that has been experienced, with “back to office” calls and those kinds of things that we have heard about in the wider media, which have limited the expansion or continued use of these arrangements in some organisations.
Professor Parry: We did a project for the ESRC during lockdown called “Work After Lockdown”, which followed organisations through that period. In that situation, where it was a survival thing for organisations that they had to make remote working effective, they said that it particularly benefited parents of young children and disabled people. There were many more people asking if they could have part-time hours extended to full-time hours because they were not just working remotely; they were working flexibly, with hours variation as well. Once that is possible, it is possible to increase your hours.
Q45 Chair: Professor Wheatley, we have noted that there are entrenched assumptions about the risks of employing disabled people. Could you tell us a wee bit about what these assumptions are and to what extent the risks are real or not?
Professor Wheatley: Absolutely. There are several linked perceptions held by a lot of employers, or members of organisations, that limit employment rates and opportunities among disabled people. I will list them in no particular order, but they are linked. The first is the cost of accommodation, or perceptions around the cost of accommodation. Evidence shows that most reasonable adjustments, or accommodations, can come in at low cost or potentially even at no cost. In some cases, they are just having positive conversations and altering work routines. Also, support from Government schemes like Access to Work can address some of those concerns around the cost of accommodation, but awareness of those schemes and other issues around the use of those schemes currently limits overall use. Therefore, the continued perception about the costs of accommodating disabled people persists.
The second perception is about risks and reliability. There is a perception that disabled people present more risk to the organisation, such as risks of absence and the risks of costs of covering posts. Again, evidence suggests that, in many cases, disabled people have lower rates of absence, owing to existing levels of resilience in managing their disability. Evidence also points to the fact that disabled people often overcompensate and so are actually more likely to want to show commitment to their organisation through, in some cases, working through illness.
The next perception is about productivity. There is a perception that disabled people are less productive, in part owing to some of those concerns around risk and reliability. The evidence does not align with that, though; the application of reasonable adjustments can absolutely offset any productivity concerns. Most productivity concerns come from a lack of awareness and assumptions that the performance of disabled people reflects their disability and the individual, rather than that they have not been accommodated within the organisation to work to their best.
I want to mention organisational awareness and culture. Many organisations and organisation leaders lack awareness of disability and often have a limited perception of what disability actually is. I recently led a study called AI-empowered, which is mainly focused on the implications of AI and automation technologies for disabled people’s working lives, but it explored flexibility within that. We had quite candid conversations with employers. When we approached them to work with us to perform case studies, they came back to us and said, “Oh, we don’t employ any disabled people. No one in a wheelchair could work in this organisation.” That very limited understanding and perception of disability has a real impact on employment opportunities for disabled people and continued experiences of work. Lack of awareness of Government support mechanisms also plays into this piece. That is an area where the Government could make a real impact by doing more.
We gathered quite a bit of evidence that implied a lack of willingness to acknowledge and recognise disability in some cases, partly because it was seen as being difficult to deal with. Organisations, or organisation representatives in some cases, were again quite candid that they would avoid employing disabled people because they did not think that they would contribute to the organisation or because they felt that their disability would be problematic in some way. All that is linked to these underlying perceptions and lack of understanding.
Cultures built around the ideal of full-time, physically present workers perpetuate in society. We still very much have that as the dominant understanding and image of what an ideal worker looks like or should be, in terms of their offer to the organisation and what that means in terms of their commitment to the organisation. That needs to be addressed. We need to continue to educate employers and people more generally to understand different ways of working and the benefits for everyone. There are mutual gains to be had for employer and employee.
Within all this, one of the key underlying outcomes is that the application of reasonable adjustments can address all these things. Some of them are things that do not hold anyway, but even where there is evidence that productivity, for example, might be impacted if people do not get accommodations in place, when those accommodations are in place, those perceptions do not hold any more. In all cases there is good evidence to show that those perceptions are unjust and are actively discriminating against disabled people gaining employment opportunities and having positive experiences in work.
Q46 Chair: You talk about misperceptions. Are there actually business benefits of designing jobs in such a way that disabled people can thrive in them? You also talk about the lack of awareness of Government support. If there are benefits to designing jobs in certain ways, is there something that Government can do to promote those benefits and encourage them to be designed?
Professor Wheatley: In our study we refer to inclusive design principles: thinking about jobs in terms of how you get the most from all talent, in the broadest sense. How do we get the most from the talent we have and the talent pool that we want to access? Job design that accounts for the tasks present in the job, the resources that are needed to complete those tasks and that recognises the benefits of personalisation and flexibility—tailoring the tasks and the job to the individual who you want to complete it—will generate the best outcomes. It allows people to work in the way that they work best. Some people may need breaks because of chronic health conditions that mean that they encounter physical pain throughout the working day, so it seems unreasonable to expect someone to work a set routine that may fit someone else’s preferences when it does not work for them. Designing those kind of principles into jobs is essential.
In terms of Government’s role in that, we can look at existing practices around things such as flexible working arrangements more broadly and the things that ACAS does. Codes of practices and case studies are really important to provide real-life examples of good practice that people can see, and tangible evidence of how this can be done practically—how we can make it work.
One key point I want to make is that it is essential to get employers on board and not just mandate things. People will find ways around mandates is they do not feel that they have been part of the conversation or come on board with the change. Getting employers in the right mindset to want to employ disabled people, to see the benefits of the diversity and lived experience that they bring to the organisation, will generate the best mutual benefits for everyone.
Dr Holland: I agree completely. There is a huge wealth of international evidence that flexible working has benefits for individuals and organisations. In fact the autonomy and control literature goes back to the 1970s; I was reading it when I first started out in the 1990s, so it is there. In our study, people said, “If I can work remotely, in a hybrid way, I can work around my symptoms. I can rest in between jobs,” so sickness absence was going down, productivity was going up and job retention was supported, so there are very tangible benefits to individuals. Employers we interviewed in the study who had implemented remote and hybrid working said the same thing: staff wellbeing had improved, productivity had either improved or at least been maintained, and they could recruit better and retain staff.
There is also loads of literature on the positive benefits for individuals and organisations of other forms of flexibility, such as part-time working and so on. In a Scottish survey of flexible working conducted last year, 85% of employers had only positive things to say about it. However, Work Foundation and myself did some research this year and unfortunately found that only 44% of employers are designing jobs to promote health, including through flexible working, so much more needs to be done in that space.
I completely agree with what has just been said: none of this will change unless the evidence base is synthesised, simplified and brought together with detailed economic analysis of the costs and benefits in terms of productivity, turnover, retention, recruitment and enhanced reputation. I am sure that there are academics on this panel who would be more than willing to do that job. Nothing will change until employers are on board, and to get employers on board they need to understand the implications for the bottom line. That is what it boils down to. As Daniel said, they need detailed case studies by organisational sector and size, and by impairment and condition type, so that if they have staff members with particular conditions or impairments, they can think, “Okay, these are the kinds of things I can do, in my sector and organisational size, for this particular person.”
Professor Chung: I will be happy to do the return on investment for flexible working; that has been done in the US, in terms of the cost of return-to-office mandates. Beyond that, I want to highlight that one reason why reasonable adjustments sometimes do not work is that people do not want to ask for them. As I said, these individual deals are never really good, because they single you out and make you look like someone who cannot be devoted to work or be the ideal worker that Daniel talked about. It is crucial to talk about designing jobs for everyone.
I really want to highlight that when you design jobs that are reasonably adjusted and inclusive for disabled workers, it is beneficial for mothers, for fathers—for anyone with any caring responsibility, which we all have, maybe for ourselves or for others—and for people like myself and others who have long-term fluctuating illnesses, because one thing we know for certain is that most of us will have some sort of illness that we will need some care for.
This is a design principle. It is not for disabled workers; it is inclusive of disabled workers, but it is not only for them. Only when you start talking about it like that can this be a policy that is meaningful and does not discriminate or stigmatise disabled workers or other targeted groups. Some of the studies we have collected recently highlight that once you start to have policies for specific groups that are traditionally seen as a little unproductive or as not meeting that worker ideal, anyone who uses that policy will face career consequences. It is really important for these policies to be broad, universal and for everyone when they are implemented, although as Daniel said, you obviously do need some adjustment for specific purposes.
What the Government can do foremost is to be the flexible employer. The Government were an innovative frontrunner—a pioneer, if I may—in being a flexible employer pre-pandemic. In the work we carried out with the Trades Union Congress, so many Government workers, who will remain anonymous, highlighted how important it was for them to manage their health and mental health issues through a lot of these policies when working for the Government. We know that this has been clawed back somewhat in recent years, not because Government officials or civil servants were unproductive, but because of political ideas and debates around these issues and a feeling of defensiveness about the implementation of these policies. You need foremost to be much braver and to be the frontrunner in providing these policies for workers, because you are being a role model for other employers to follow. It is also about being the competitive employer and having an opportunity for these workers.
You can also use these kinds of policies for tendering processes. We use Athena SWAN as a mechanism to highlight certain companies that can provide Government tenders. You could use the same thing for flexible working or other types of adjustment for workers, to provide SMEs especially with consultation, evidence or just guidelines on how to do it. A lot of companies want to do it and do so informally—it will not be picked up in our survey data, but a lot of informal work is being done in SMEs—but sometimes, they just do not know what to do.
Finally, it is about providing all workers, including disabled workers, with more rights. That may be speeding up tribunal processes, increasing rights around these things or just enhancing collective bargaining processes, maybe through unions or other workers’ organisations. That is just to ensure that if it needs to be an ideal—one individual deal—workers are grounded in a firm standing of not having weak negotiating power when asking for these things.
Q47 Dame Nia Griffith: It is nice to see you all. Dr Holland, you and others have referred to the idea of employers having a duty to put up front in adverts that there are opportunities for flexible working. Could you explain what you think the impact of that would be?
Dr Holland: Most definitely. The revisions to the Employment Rights Act are positive in that they will make it easier for people to access flexible roles if they are already working—from the first day of employment. But that does not help jobseekers, and lots of disabled people need a guarantee that they can work flexibly before they will even apply, never mind take on the job. So we think that a legal duty for employers to make clear in job adverts whether flexible working arrangements are possible, which types and, importantly, whether they are not—actually saying, “I’m sorry, but this is an inflexible job,” for example—would increase the stock of available flexible roles.
Interestingly, I discovered this week a trial conducted by the Government Equalities Office working with the job website Indeed. They found that if, when employers were placing online adverts, they were prompted, with a template, to choose from a range of flexible options, that increased the chances of them advertising the role flexibly by 20%. Lots of employers are probably willing to offer flexible roles, but may not have thought about that, and they need prompting and support to do so. If we had really clear advertising, it would help disabled people decide whether they want to apply for a job but, critically, in relation to things like WorkWell, Connect to Work and Jobcentre Plus, it would help with job matching as well.
As I said about the Adzuna data, demand is high, but the stock of available jobs is low. Timewise said that currently only a third of jobs are advertised as remote, and in the Scottish study that I mentioned, a third of jobseekers had declined a role because they discovered that flexible working was not available, so this is a real deterrent.
I completely agree that Government needs to lead by example. We found that on the DWP “Find a job” advertising website, only 3.8% of jobs were advertised as remote or hybrid. Again, employers are not going to take any notice unless Government does it first.
If I may just add one more thing, definitely to the employment duty, let’s be radical. The disability employment gap has not changed in years; we have seen Governments and initiatives come and go. How about considering whether all job vacancies should be flexible by default, which would then require employers to opt out and say, “No, this can’t be offered”? Some jobs cannot be flexible. I understand that; I am not naive. But if we turned this on its head, so that rather than employees asking for it through the Employment Rights Act, jobs were all flexible by default from the outset, and the onus was on employers to opt out and explain why a job is not flexible, that would almost overnight get employers thinking, “Do you know what? We could offer flexi-hours or hybrid for this.”
The last point is this. Organisations are going to be asked about disability pay gaps and so on, but adding a requirement that they report on the proportion of job vacancies that are flexible would also be quite helpful.
Q48 Dame Nia Griffith: Is it part of your thinking that the onus is on the candidate to ask the employer whether they can have flexible working, and that is something they might be frightened of asking for, because they might think, “Oh, I can’t say that in my first letter to them, because they will just throw it away and I won’t get an interview. It will completely destroy my chances”?
Dr Holland: Exactly. Heejung has done research saying that there is flexibility stigma, and there absolutely is. And it is a competitive jobs market. People are not even getting to the recruitment process, because employers are using AI to filter—it has just ruined everything. So if you start saying “Oh, can I have these arrangements?” even before you have got your foot through the door—most people just accept what is offered. Once they have got their foot in the door, the Employment Rights Act will allow them, from day one, to ask, but people certainly are not going to ask in advance, because that might be a black mark against them. So if employers have to make things clear by saying, “These are the flexibilities” or “This is inflexible”—let’s call it what it is—“It is an inflexible role. It has to be 9 to 5,” or whatever the shift is, people know where they stand.
Q49 Dame Nia Griffith: You have mentioned some figures, but have you any research into the proportion of jobs that could be flexible but are not advertised as such?
Dr Holland: No, I haven’t.
Q50 Dame Nia Griffith: Does anyone have any background on that?
Professor Chung: We have looked at, for example, teleworkable jobs. We have an index that uses a range of items: the knowledge base, whether you are using technology, and so on. And in fact the teleworkable jobs and the currently provided jobs—there is a gap between them. Also, in terms of the larger flexibility that I mentioned, it is really interesting to see it in the national comparative perspective and to see how in particular the northern European countries and other countries have such a high level of flexible working—not just remote and hybrid working, but flexible schedules and part-time working. They really have a higher proportion, even in sectors where we think flexibility is not possible, maybe education or health and social care—sectors where, in the UK, that flexibility is not as big. You can see that it is possible. There is that gap.
The other thing that we have seen in our survey of working arrangements and attitudes is that there is also a gap between what people want and what they are getting. Again, the right to request is not as strong as we would like it to be. As Paula said, if people ask for flexible working, they are just automatically assumed not to be a good worker, and to be putting family issues before work or not prioritising work. So it is a really delicate process and people do not ask for it. Quite a significant number of people—especially mothers but also fathers—are not getting it even if they ask. So there is a huge gap that you can see.
Q51 Dame Nia Griffith: We have made some reference to what more Government and organisations could do. Does anyone want to add anything on any of that?
Professor Wheatley: Just a couple of things. To build on Paula's point, there is a massive benefit to all parties having an explicit statement of how a job is flexible or not. Interestingly, we ran a survey in our study asking a similar question to Paula’s study, about whether disabled people would like or find it useful to work remotely or in a hybrid way, and got the same figure of 85% from a completely different sample of 1,400 people. Interestingly, what that means is that 15% of disabled people do not want to work at home. Recognising that is also important.
There are real benefits to matching up people’s needs and preferences with what jobs offer. Employers need not fear advertising a job with what might be seen as lesser locational or hours flexibility, because some people might want that. Some people might like that rigidity—being able to go home at the end of the day and work being done with. It benefits all parties to have that explicit statement of the nature of the flexibility. Enforcing that kind of change would be really beneficial to the labour market and avoid the matching up problem that you have—as Paula mentioned—with people then rejecting jobs and things like that, which creates cost for organisations. Hiring is a massive cost for organisations, so addressing that to try to make it more efficient is going to benefit everyone.
Professor Parry: Your question was about what proportion of jobs could be flexible. We can just look at remote working during the pandemic: nearly half the population were working remotely. When needs be, a lot of jobs can be made remote. With digital technologies, that might increase in the future. It is difficult to envisage jobs that could not have any flexibility, if you see flexibility in broad terms: part-time working, term-time working, compressed hours and so on; and new forms of flexible working are developing all the time. We saw in 2022 the four-day working week trial, in which 61 organisations took part. At the end of that, 89% said that they were going to continue with the trial outside the assessment period; 50% permanently changed their business model; and none of the disabled people taking part said that it had not improved their personal life.
Professor Chung: In relation to things like factories or manufacturing, people think, “Oh, flexibility is going to be difficult,” but there have been numerous trials, the four-day week being one of them, with, again, enhanced productivity outcomes—really tangible productivity outcomes. There are also self-rostering systems. This has been done a lot in the care sector, which is another sector with really high turnover, burnout and problems with recruitment and retaining skills. There have been so many different trials. Flexibility can be achieved in so many different ways as long as employers are really engaged in the process of understanding that this is actually a business win scenario for them.
Q52 Dame Nia Griffith: To what extent do we feel that employers are aware of and willing to promote the fact that in the workplace there are so many different ways—it is not just the hybrid stuff—whereby flexibilities can be introduced? Should we be doing more to raise that awareness?
Professor Parry: You could do a lot. Organisations tend to stick with the flexibility they have been used to. For example, local authorities use flexi-hours, and there is part-time working in hospitals. Opening up the world of flexible working possibilities to them would be hugely beneficial. Case studies of particular industries that they may not have thought flexible working was adaptable to, looking at the problems they face and how they solve them—not just the success stories—could let them see how it can be applied to their own business.
Professor Chung: There are success stories. Also, Working Families has good employer indexes and so on, and those things help. I have been speaking to a lot of CHROs—chief HR officers—and CEOs, and there is a lot of peer pressure around this. One thing we notice with the whole RTO movement is that there is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction: because the market is not doing well, CEOs are now turning back to the old ways of working and thinking that those might be a solution. But there is another bit: “If everybody else is going back to the office, maybe I need to do it.” So there is a bit of peer pressure or nervousness when introducing policies.
It is great if Government can be a role model, but Government can maybe provide a little bit of a stick—for example, maybe collecting some of this data through gender pay gap reporting, so that employers have to really think about it and can see where everybody else is at. That is something that they do not really have—to what extent are other people actually doing it and benefiting? There could be case studies, but it is also possible to give a slight nudge through these other reporting processes.
Q53 Dame Nia Griffith: Daniel, you mentioned an impact assessment. Would that be a useful tool in terms of the Government perhaps widening out this debate and understanding a range of types of flexible working?
Professor Wheatley: Yes, absolutely. With any approach the Government want to take, it is essential to provide evidence—I think Heejung mentioned this earlier—to show the business case for doing that. This applies much more broadly to the arguments around different forms of flexibility, which have been ongoing for decades. In the sphere of disability, how do we evidence to employers that providing greater levels of flexibility and supporting disabled people to have better work outcomes will be beneficial to the organisation, not just the individual? Ultimately, employers may be concerned that although it is beneficial to the individual—they get a job and a better working life—it is going to come at a cost to them as an organisation. We need to show that that is not the case, and that, actually, the benefits massively outweigh the costs involved in making these changes.
One of the reasons that employers default to standard working practices is that it is easier in the short term. If everyone works the same pattern and in the same location, you know where everyone is all the time, and you can go and lean on them if you feel they are not working hard. That is old-school management practice, but it does not generate the best longer-term outcomes. The best longer-term outcomes are generated by giving people greater degrees of autonomy, within limits—understanding different jobs and roles—and positioning the individual to get the best out of them, recognising that all talent is different and that that is a positive thing.
Q54 Dame Nia Griffith: We have touched quite a lot on examples, like in the healthcare sector, which Professor Chung referenced, where people have to be there physically. The challenge is always how you spread good practice. What thoughts do people have on that? Am I right in thinking, Jane, that you have done some work on that and on spreading best practice?
Professor Parry: We did some research with ACAS on how employers were managing hybrid work post pandemic—five large organisations that were good-practice flexible-working employers. One interesting thing that came out of that was in healthcare. They had this challenge that some of their teams could not work in a hybrid way, and that they had to balance people working complicated flexible working patterns. Rather than having conversations between the manager and the person who wanted flexible working, they were developing team flexible working. The manager would encourage everyone to talk about their needs and build into that the constraints. As a collective, teams would come to an agreement about what the shift models would look like, and that was very transparent. It built trust into the flexible working pattern and everyone understood what everyone else’s needs were.
Sharing exactly how that goes on, and the kinds of problems you might have as you go through it and how you resolve them is really useful to share with other organisations and might be applied across different sectors as well as within healthcare. Even within organisations you have people with different needs. For example, in a local authority you have office-based workers who can work hybrid, but you might have refuse collectors and people working in outreach who have to be on multiple sites. Organisations were wrestling with how to counterbalance the hybrid offer that we make to some people, but not others. Here they saw flexible work as their key tool. They could not offer flexible hybrid work to everyone, but they could offer them a much bigger range of flexible working than they had previously, and thus make them feel like they were valued just as much as the hybrid workers.
Dr Holland: ACAS has some really good examples on its website of case studies of nine-day fortnights, compressed hours and annualised hours for jobs that are not desk-based. There is evidence out there. It is just a case of highlighting it with much more detailed examples by sector and organisational size.
Professor Chung: I think that would be quite useful. We hear from managers that the return to office and decline of remote or hybrid working is because a lot of managers do not have the confidence to manage a hybrid team. Bigger organisations might have the capacity to do more training, or at least outsource some of the training for that, but a lot of SMEs might not be able to. We need to see what we can provide at a larger scale to provide that confidence in terms of not only trusting your workers, but seeing what tools are available to make sure you can manage it with complex, flexible and hybrid teams. As Dan said, managers and employers shy away from flexibility because it is just too complex. Having everyone in the office 9 to 5 is very simple, which is why they want to go back to that. We have to make everything simple and make it easy for them to transition to other modes.
Q55 Dame Nia Griffith: Very often it is easy for a senior person to ask for something, but many disabled people are in more marginal, precarious roles and it is a lot more difficult for them to ask. Is that something that you have come across in your work?
Professor Chung: It is interesting to look at international comparisons. In the Netherlands, in the beginning was the Wet aanpassing arbeidsduur, the working time adjustment law, which has now turned into the flexible working law. That has been much more efficient than our right to request. It has to do with the Dutch labour systems and collective bargaining. Again, this wasn’t an individualised agreement, yet the Dutch do have stronger labour unions and stronger labour rights. In the UK you have reasonable adjustments and right to request, but our collective bargaining systems and worker powers are still quite weak. Even when workers are trying to ask, it is not such a strong request.
So this is not just about rewriting the flexible working legislation. The Employee Rights Act and the new flexible working has a trial period, which I think is really good, especially for providing employers with the confidence to see it is actually working out. It is like, “We try it out and if it does not work, we can adjust it again.”
It is hard to just rely on these individual deals because a lot of disabled workers are in a relatively weaker position in the labour market. It is much better to try to provide that strength legislatively through tribunals and other protective mechanisms. Another way is to see whether, as I think all of us have now said at one point or another, we can encourage employers to not just look at the disabled worker, but at the entire work design to make it inclusive for everyone. Naturally then, disabled workers will be able to just have those accesses without having to negotiate individually. Unions and employee representatives will be crucial in that process.
Dr Holland: Let me take a step back and look at why disabled people have weaker bargaining power. We started with the point about disabled people being over-represented in jobs where there is not flexibility, and somebody made a point about low-quality, insecure jobs causing disability. We also have children and young people with additional needs and disability who are not being properly supported at school and college, and who achieve fewer qualifications at every single stage—GCSE, A-level and degree. There is a pipeline of people not getting inclusive and good-quality education because they have additional needs and ending up in those jobs. We know that those jobs are health damaging, so it becomes a circular problem.
We have an unemployment crisis at the moment among young people. Apprenticeships are wonderful, but there are not enough of them, and they need to be flexible. We are talking about flexible work, but we need flexible training, too. We need part-time apprenticeships, and apprenticeships that are remote and hybrid, with compressed hours, flexi-hours and so on—good quality apprenticeships. When you look at apprenticeships on the Government website, you see that they are in fairly low-skilled, low-wage sectors. We need them across sectors, but we definitely need more professional and managerial ones. They should be targeted and ringfenced for young people with additional needs or who are disabled so that there is not an automatic pipeline from inclusive education and inclusive training to low-quality, insecure work.
Q56 Kevin McKenna: I would like to focus a bit more on the Equality Act and some of the longer-standing provisions and legal protections around reasonable adjustments. Paula, to what extent are employers and disabled employees aware of the duty to provide flexible working arrangements as reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act?
Dr Holland: We need only to look at surveys, including my own—Unison and the TUC have done them, too—that look at the proportion of disabled people who have got the reasonable adjustments that they have asked for. It is astonishingly low. Our study showed that only 53% of disabled remote and hybrid workers had their adjustment fully implemented, so there is either an appallingly low awareness of the duty, or employers are completely aware but are not doing anything about it because there is very little incentive to do so.
The main route of compliance is a disabled person having the time and energy to put together a disability discrimination case and take it to an employment tribunal. If you are still working in that organisation, you are not going to want to do that because it will be awful for you to carry on working there, so it is mostly people who end up having to leave the occupation who do that. I don’t know the stats, but the time, energy and stress must put a lot of people off, so you get only a small proportion who make it through. We need to see much stronger enforcement.
We have talked about the business case. There is an education carrot and stick: education first, and the business case is easily presented, but then we need much stronger enforcement. In the inclusive remote and hybrid study, we interviewed employers about how and why they implemented remote and hybrid. Some of them had done it as a reasonable adjustment, so there is obviously awareness, and some had done it as a universal policy for all.
We strongly suspect that the employers in our study were fairly inclusive. We know that it is really hard. I am sure everyone at this table will attest to the fact that trying to get employers involved in any kind of research on any of these issues is very difficult because you are looking at their employment practices, so I do not think our sample is particularly typical. As I said, 53% of the disabled people in our survey had got full adjustments, but others had not. Often, they had not got them because the employer had outright refused or were delaying, or there were Access to Work waiting lists. Of course, working without adjustments puts people at risk of illness and injury. We definitely need education to raise awareness, and measures to enforce compliance.
Professor Wheatley: Organisation size is a really important factor in this. In small organisations, the flatter hierarchies mean that, with those more personal relationships, requesting a reasonable adjustment is much more challenging at an individual level. There is a perceived risk that it might affect career development or even access to employment in the first place, if it is at point of recruitment. In large organisations, our study identified a different underlying mechanism of difficulty around process gaps and accountability issues. Often, reasonable adjustments will be requested and then go through multiple layers of hierarchy to get approved. At various points, that system can fail through lack of accountability and decision making not taking place. That can create delays, which of course impact the worker’s performance and wellbeing, or in more severe cases, actually result in the worker feeling that they may need to leave the job or like it is just not working out for them.
Alongside that, the delays in accessing Government schemes like Access to Work, in the short term at least, require the employer to provide a shorter-term adjustment while they wait for the outcome of the application. That creates a lot of tension in the relationship, because employers see that as a cost and do not necessarily see how they are going to generate the benefit. That is due to awareness and education, as Paula says, and some of the ongoing perception and entrenched issues around understanding of disability.
Q57 Kevin McKenna: If you want to improve the processes that are operating and the eventual outcomes, what can Government or any other relevant bodies or players in this area actually do to improve those?
Dr Holland: We have mentioned several times the need to improve the business case guidance on what is a reasonable adjustment and what kinds of reasonable adjustments are good for these particular types of impairments or health conditions, for people working with those conditions in these particular sizes of organisations or employment sectors.
Education is a huge part of it, but there is enforcement, too. The disability employment charter recommends that the Government introduce a two-week deadline for employers to respond to a request for reasonable adjustments. The outcome of that two-week deadline would be, in writing, either a flat refusal with reasons, which could then be taken to a tribunal, or it could be, “Yes, of course we are going to do that for you, and this is the timetable for implementation.” The reason why that it is really important and a cracking idea is because the TUC found that 82% of disabled people waited between four and 12 months for their adjustments. As I said, every day that a disabled person works without adjustments that they need in place puts them at risk of illness, injury, stress and job loss.
Professor Chung: In our study looking at the lived experiences of hybrid workers, a lot of them were disabled workers, and one of the things they talked about was the fear of their manager moving. Even if things are in place, it is so management-driven, based around a one-to-one relationship. The onus is on the employee to request adjustments and ask for this and that thing without even understanding what is possible. That is hard to do, because it puts them in a very vulnerable position. Once a new manager comes in, a lot of that is lost again. An idea that has been suggested is having a passport, so that managers who come in could always see it, in a way that does not invade privacy, as even talking about disability in itself can be quite a challenging task.
The other thing is to try to encourage organisations to have a suite of policies available for people to draw from. What are reasonable adjustments? I think Dan mentioned this. A lot of employers think of this as a complex thing, but it could actually be very simple things. It says it on the tin: it is “reasonable” ways in which we work. It could be about the way you conduct meetings, the start or end of the day, or appointments. These are very small things that, once managers know about them, will be easy to implement. That puts the onus on the individual manager, so the Government need to provide a suite of options, or companies—especially large companies—need to have it in place that they must have a suite of policies for people to draw from. Many good employers actually do this already. That could be quite a good way as well.
Dr Holland: In their evidence to this Committee, I think the Health Foundation, Disability Rights UK and IOSH all suggested the same thing: a national health and work service for disabled people and employers, so that employers could use it to find out about reasonable adjustments. They could get in contact if they had a person who needed support. There could be training and guidance on what is reasonable, what reasonable adjustments are and, critically, how to design flexible roles in various formats. That would be another way of raising awareness of employers’ responsibilities under the Equality Act and the Employment Rights Act.
Professor Chung: At the end of the day, it is about trying to reduce any friction caused. That is key here, because people say, “Oh, I find it challenging even to figure out what they are or to try to implement them.” We should try to ease those frictions through these services. Again, there are so many NGOs and civil societies that are willing to provide people with evidence, case studies and approaches.
Dr Holland: It needs bringing together.
Professor Chung: Absolutely.
Professor Wheatley: One final point on that: I go back to the idea of inclusive design principles, which actually addresses a lot of the smaller reasonable adjustments.
In our study, we had an example of a member of staff at an organisation who just needed to go outside once an hour because of the nature of their disability. They were neurodiverse and it was just a routine thing, but they needed that to be accepted: that once an hour they needed to physically go outside. Just adopting inclusive design principles—giving people the underlying flexibility to make their own day—addresses a lot of those smaller reasonable adjustments. That means that the organisation has the capacity to deal with more complex reasonable adjustments such as support workers or assistive technologies, which require a bit more investigation and effort to put in place. Overall, the impact of doing that is still going to be beneficial, because it allows the worker to work to their best capabilities.
Q58 Kevin McKenna: It has been quite a while since the Equality Act was passed, and there has been a lot of thinking about neurodivergence and fluctuating health conditions since then. How well does the Equality Act’s conception of reasonable adjustments fit with a more developed understanding around neurodivergence and fluctuating health conditions?
Professor Wheatley: It is tough. There is an issue around translation of policy to practice here. In reality, the understanding is quite limited around what disability is. I think of the nature of fluctuating disabilities, the nature of what some people might call invisible or less visible disabilities, and some employers.
We are quite candid in our study. We have examples of employees we interviewed who said that their employers simply did not believe that they had a condition because it was not something that was visible. We had an example of a worker who was asked to work really long hours in a quite intense industry and who had a chronic health condition. They said it was leaving them absolutely flat out with nothing left. They had asked for a reasonable adjustment to work reduced hours with reduced pay and had been told that that was not reasonable.
Again, in SME environments, while these things may be borderline in terms of legality, what actually happens, as Paula mentioned, is that people ask themselves, “Am I going to try to take it to some kind of tribunal or get some external support?” In reality, most people will do one of two things: either they will just accept that they will not get the reasonable adjustment, or they will be forced to leave the job. Neither of those is a positive outcome. There definitely needs to be consideration given to different types of conditions and a recognition of the distinctiveness of disability, its dynamism and the fact that it changes over time and that people can go from one to multiple conditions or forms of disability.
Professor Chung: We are going to say this over and over again: that once you have inclusive design in the organisation, you do not even need to think about who is or is not disabled, or who has a long-term fluctuating illness. I have a long-term fluctuating illness and it is chronic, but we have an inclusive design. I do not necessarily need reasonable adjustments, because as academics our design is already de facto flexible. I do not necessarily identify as disabled at the times when my chronic illness flares up. It is the same for menopause, for example. Menopause is a very fluctuating and unpredictable thing. Once you have inclusive design, all these definitions—who is categorised as this or that—almost become no longer important.
Q59 Kevin McKenna: Is it enough to have more proactive guidance, support and information for employers in all sizes of organisation? Do we need to look again at the law and establish a broader conception of what disability looks like in legislation?
Dr Holland: In its phrasing, the Equality Act definition is fairly narrow: it refers to a long-term condition that has a “substantial and long-term” impact on daily activities. Not everybody fits into that. For example, there are people with a visible difference that does not affect their daily activities but who are absolutely discriminated against in the labour market. The social model of disability would say that that person is disabled.
I did research a long time ago with people with rheumatoid arthritis. That is fairly invisible, but it is absolutely a fluctuating condition; in a flare-up, people have a lot of health problems, mobility problems and stiff joints. Under the Equality Act, they would be disabled, because it is a long-term condition, even if they are affected only during a flare-up, but employers might not understand that. That is what Dan was saying before about reasonable adjustments. You might have an employee who is fine on Monday but then not well on Tuesday.
There is a massive literature on invisible conditions and disbelief—people do not believe you. I completely agree with inclusive design, but we need a clear definition, because that is what is discussed in the tribunals, isn’t it?
Professor Chung indicated assent.
Dr Holland: People need to know whether they are disabled or not. Of course, some people do not like that term—lots of neurodivergent and deaf people do not see themselves as disabled. But in the eyes of the law, if you have any impairment or health condition that has an impact on you—even if it is discrimination, as opposed to an impact on your daily activities—you should be covered. In the definition, there are some examples. AIDS and HIV are listed there as well; people do not always think that they are disabilities. The text needs to be much more nuanced so that it can include certain fluctuating conditions and invisible conditions. Employers will then be left with absolutely no misunderstanding about people being covered.
Kevin McKenna: I will back you up on that one, not just because I have HIV but because I have psoriatic arthritis. In employment, there is always a question as to whether I say I am disabled. I know that legally I am, absolutely, but in practice it often does not make sense to say that.
Q60 Rachel Taylor: I will come to you first, Jane. We have talked about the system of reasonable adjustments not working as well as it should. Do you think that the compliance and enforcement regime for employers’ reasonable adjustment duty under the Equality Act is widely considered to be inadequate?
Professor Parry: There is definitely an enforcement gap, but the answer is not just enforcement. We have talked a lot today about the culture change that is needed. There are people who are wilfully non-compliant, but there are also employers who just lack the knowledge to implement flexibility in a meaningful way. The law provides the scaffolding, but employers still need the knowledge and capability to build effective practice around that.
There is already confusion among employers about how to go about seeking reasonable adjustments, particularly when people might not yet have a diagnosis. That could particularly be the case for younger people—around neurodiversity and so on. That is something that might be complicated with the new route in the Employment Rights Act, and the Government implying that flexibility could be a way of achieving reasonable adjustments.
We recently did some research with young workers who all worked in hybrid ways. About half of them had long-term health conditions or neurodiversity, and they were often told to go away and work out for themselves what they wanted, and then come back to the employer. That is putting the onus on the people with the least power and least knowledge about the system to try to navigate it, which is not ideal. I will give a couple of examples.
A young worker with ADHD was told to pay for her own specialist equipment—no, she did pay for her own specialist equipment, because it had not occurred to her that there would be a route that she could get that through. That is a knowledge and confidence gap. She was training in architecture, so she needed a lot of focus, but she found it difficult to be in the office every day because it was so noisy. She also found that the pressure of masking day after day was exhausting, so she needed to work remotely at least two days a week.
Another one had a sensory processing difficulty and a fairly long commute to the office. We got them to keep diaries, and she was talking about a time when she had to be in the office every day, which had really negative impacts on her health. She said, “If I had to be in the office like this all the time, I would just hand my notice in. I’m tired, I’m in pain and my ability to do my job has suffered. It is just not sustainable long term.”
Both of those were working flexibly informally—it was an arrangement with their managers—although we are aware that there were discussions going on in the organisations about having in-office quotas. If enforced, that might mean that those sorts of people choose to go through a reasonable adjustment, but they would then have to find out about that process to get security around their flexible working.
Q61 Rachel Taylor: Can more be done proactively with robust enforcement? If so, how could that be achieved?
Professor Parry: We do need more proactive enforcement. That could be clearer organisational accountability, with action being taken if people are found to be disregarding the law. It could be accessible routes for intervention before a case reaches tribunal, which is obviously not what the person who needs the adjustments wants to happen. As we have said, without reasonable adjustments every day is a day when you are at risk of having to come out of the labour market.
Professor Chung: The enforcement piece is really important, but as Jane mentioned, one of the other things is the knowledge gap. In all the case studies we have done, we have found that to be the case when you are working flexibly.
In one of our cases, the worker was hybrid working—they were in the office and at home—but they were not sure whether the equipment they needed for their disability should have been in both places. The worker themselves did not know, so they ended up buying their own equipment and setting up their own office. There is then this whole issue in many offices that when people are hybrid working, they are hotdesking. They would have had a set-up, but that did not necessarily guarantee their space.
Even with flexible working, there are all these kinds of nuances for the workers themselves. They knew that they had access to reasonable adjustments, but to what extent and how? Again, this was quite a large and relatively good employer, but it did not even know those things. It has to go hand in hand. It was not that it was a bad employer that just did not do it; it is that no one really knew where the lines of reasonable adjustments were, so the most vulnerable person ended up being hindered most.
Professor Parry: In open-plan offices, it has become more of an issue that you have generic workspaces that are difficult to adapt. There are relatively few where standing desks are available, for example, and there is a lot of competition for that.
Dr Holland: In our study, we recommended that disabled people be completely exempt from hotdesking. We had blind people in our study who said that they needed everything on their desk without it being touched, and we had neurodivergent people saying, “I absolutely need to know where I am going in the morning.” Parents dropping off children get into the office late, and all the best desks will be gone. Unfortunately, hotdesking has become part of the hybrid movement as some offices have downsized, but disabled people need there to be a reasonable adjustment. We are actually producing some employer guidance at the moment, and exempting people is one of the things that we are going to say.
Professor Wheatley: Heejung mentioned reasonable adjustment passports earlier, which seem like a really useful tool for addressing a lot of these problems. I am very much an advocate of open conversations, and both parties benefit from those conversations. If this became a standard and a norm, disabled people would not approach employment feeling that they would be discriminated against at the outset, or for making a request, and employers would know it was a requirement to have a reasonable adjustment passport for all employees. In many cases it may not be used, but if it is there, it provides an opportunity for people to request a reasonable adjustment. That would address a lot of underlying issues about enforcement in a way that brings people on board rather than applying mandates on people.
Professor Chung: The other good thing is that it also guarantees a bit of protection when changing management or changing companies. You can carry it with you. Potentially, we could make it so that civil societies can say, “Yes, under the law and under legislation, these are absolutely reasonable.” You would have that in hand and know that you have a state-guaranteed provision that you could request of any employers, within the organisation or in others.
Q62 Rachel Taylor: I have to try to focus the questions on enforcement, even though I am getting the clear idea that most of you think it is better to work collaboratively and try to bring people along. Given the limited resources available to the EHRC, some people suggest that there is a role for the Fair Work Agency in enforcing reasonable adjustments. Do you see potential benefits in that? Are there any pitfalls or unintended consequences to guard against?
Professor Parry: The risks, which we have touched on already, are that applicants could be confused about the routes and responsibilities that they should go through, and that there could be fragmented responsibilities or even people being passed between agencies. But if those can be tackled, there could be a real streamlining benefit in having a single enforcement agency that gives workers and employers a clear front door for advice. It should not be a door that people are passed through to be directed somewhere else.
You might want to see the briefing paper recently published by the Institute of Employment Rights. It was fairly sceptical about whether the Fair Work Agency could deliver this, because of the significant drop in funding for enforcement: it has about halved recently.
Professor Wheatley: The underlying point is that if you give someone the resource to do it, they can do it. If no one has any resource to do it, they are not going to be able to do it, so give them the money.
Q63 Rachel Taylor: So there should be more emphasis on enforcement?
Professor Wheatley: It needs to be balanced both ways. You are not going to get employers on board just by enforcing things and mandating. We need to educate, get employers on board and understand the business benefits of doing this and the organisational benefits more broadly. If you want to make enforcement effective, you need to be resourced to achieve that.
Kim Leadbeater: Thank you for coming, everyone; I apologise for the fact that I could not be here for the first half of the session. I am Kim. I am going to ask you some questions about the Employment Rights Act 2025 and the interaction with the Equality Act, which I think Professor Parry has touched on already. Just for the record, I think the reasonable adjustments passport sounds like a great idea, and I also do not like hotdesking.
Dr Holland: Nobody does.
Q64 Kim Leadbeater: It is not my thing. Dr Holland, I will come to you first. While the Employment Rights Act’s flexible working provisions seem to have been broadly welcomed and seem like a very good idea, it has been noted that the right to ask is not the right to have. Should the Government have gone further, or does the Act strike the right balance with new requirements? We know that it is a challenging time for employers.
Dr Holland: Making the revisions to the Act is definitely a positive move. It will make it easier for all people to access flexible working, including disabled people, and it will actually reduce the need for disabled people to request it as a reasonable adjustment if they have not told their employer that they are disabled. That is a real positive.
Another positive is that employers’ refusals will be much more transparent, because they will have to pick one of the eight business reasons for declining, but it could be tightened up and additional measures could be put in place. For example, we have talked at length about the business case. If we can present the business case for flexible working to employers, that will do a lot of the heavy lifting. It will reduce the number of refusals and the number of tribunals. We know how costly all that is to individuals and society, so that is one thing we will keep on saying all afternoon.
In my written evidence, I talked about the need to trial the requested flexible work arrangement before the employer can refuse, so that it is an evidence-based decision and not based on some kind of negative assumption. Before the pandemic, lots of people requested remote and hybrid working, for example, including as a reasonable adjustment, and people said, “No, it can’t be done. It’s impossible.” My sister used to be a legal secretary and she was told, “No, because you are dealing with confidential data." Well, hello! The pandemic meant all lawyers—everybody—working at home, so of course it can be done.
Sometimes there is an assumption that it will not work if you do a job part time or if you come in a bit later. If they had to trial the requested work arrangement, the employer could gather evidence that, “Actually, this is working,” or “Actually, no. My hunch was right: it’s not going to work.” It would also give the disabled employee a chance to try it. They might not want to, or they might ask for something else, but that would try it out.
Q65 Kim Leadbeater: Is there evidence that when it has been tried, it has worked? Or is there is evidence base that it has not?
Dr Holland: I do not know, but I cannot imagine the situation. It will go either way. The trial might end with the employer deciding, “Actually, yeah, I was right,” or the employee may decide, “Actually, I was wrong.” It could go the other way, and the employee may say, “Yes, I told you that it was going to work, and it has had all these knock-on benefits for me.”
The current process of the Employment Rights Act requires employers, if they are going to refuse, to explain to the employee why they are refusing, and that is where it ends—there is no right to appeal. Adding in two additional steps would be really helpful. Allowing the employee a right to reply to the refusal would give them an opportunity to offer any additional information they have held back. We know that not all disabled people have outed themselves at work, for obvious reasons—discrimination and so on—so they might have put a flexible working request in, been refused, and then this is their last opportunity to say, “Do you know what? Actually, I am disabled.” That is when the equality rights would kick in, so the employer would say, “Okay, fair enough, here we go.” That is the first step. The employer can then come back to the employee and say whether they will maintain their refusal or capitulate and say, “Yes, that’s good.” Currently, it is stopping where the employee asks, and the employer says no. That is the end of it. Of course, then it is tribunal. For the reasons we have given, nobody wants to go to tribunal. Why should people have to do that?
A stronger mechanism, as I have said before, is if we can normalise flexible working by making all jobs flexible. If all jobs were made flexible by default, rather than people asking for flexibility, it is up to the employer to opt out of that system, and they can say, “No, this job is inflexible for these reasons.” That would be helpful. At the moment, the onus is always on the employee, whether disabled or not, to ask for this thing and risk being rejected and told no, which will be awkward for everybody and lead to ill feeling. If flexibility is default and employers have to opt out, that would change the whole conversation.
My last point is that it is absolutely imperative that the Employment Rights Act is evaluated. We need to know whether it makes any difference at all to inequalities of access to flexible working—whether by gender, disability, ethnicity, occupation and so on. If there are certain sectors or groups of people who are being continually refused, the Government know where to target action.
Kim Leadbeater: That is really helpful, thank you. It feels as though there is a definite feeling that inclusive, flexible design should be the norm, rather than the exception.
Professor Chung: Can I add to something Paula said? If we can get employers to make flexible working the default, it would be helpful if they can be enforced to include that in advertisements and job descriptions from the very first phases of advertisement process.
If flexibility is trialled and does not work, there might be opportunities to come back and try another idea. It might be that hybrid working does not work, but flexible schedules would be another idea. It relieves the onus on employees to be very certain about these things and ensures that there is evidence. We are kind of asking employees to provide the evidence as to why this will work, so why not get employers to show evidence as to why it does not work? That is the key here. The last thing is to see, especially because we already have the gender pay gap reporting tool, whether or not we can gather some evidence around that.
I know that our colleagues at King’s College are talking about the disability employment charter. There are possibilities of signing up to the charter and seeing whether we could have flexible working or other types of reasonable adjustments mentioned, or have data collected there.
Data collection is important in two ways. One is highlighting and providing case studies of companies, so that companies that are doing well get, “Look at these amazing companies!” For an employer, it is great PR and shows that it is a great place. There is also a bit of naming and shaming. It shows which companies have the capacity and the jobs that could have these adjustments but are not providing them. It costs the Government almost no money to do this and enforce these things, but it obviously provides us with great data so that we can give you even more evidence as to the efficacy of these policies and help nudge employers the right way.
Q66 Kim Leadbeater: It seems like the feeling is about flexible inclusivity when it comes to jobs and the workplace. Is there a risk that a more formalised and stringent approach through the Employment Rights Act could disadvantage disabled people who rely on more informal reasonable adjustments? Although many of us support the Employment Rights Act, is there a risk there?
Professor Chung: All labour laws are there to protect not only workers but employers from themselves and going through this race to the bottom. All labour laws essentially help employers, based on the scientific evidence we have all collected, by saying, “These are good practices, not just for employees but for yourselves and your businesses.”
Informal policies are great when the economy is good, there are a lot of jobs and the person asking for the arrangements has either very good bargaining power or a really good relationship with their manager. That is all good, but that is not always the case. In the other cases, it is not because the employers are bad, but because they sometimes make bad decisions based on misconceptions around the efficacy of some of these policies. The legislation is quite crucial, whether it is used or not, as the protective mechanism for workers and to protect employers from themselves and making bad decisions.
Of course, even if we have the legislation in place, that does not mean that the informal policies will disappear. I think that they will still exist. It gives an extra bit of opportunity for workers to use them when necessary.
Q67 Kim Leadbeater: Professor Parry, do you want to add anything to that?
Professor Parry: To give a bit of context, we did some research with ACAS on organisational policy around flexible working and the whole ecosystem of it. We found that statutory requests, certainly in 2022-23, were by far the minority; they were a tiny proportion of what was going on in organisations. They tended to be made for particular reasons: if normal processes had broken down, if a case was too complex for the manager to deal with on their own, or if the employee felt that their manager was known to be unsympathetic to flexible working.
The vast majority of flexible working was arranged in a combination of formal and informal ways—not through right to request but through organisational policy. It was then the informal ways, the more routine things, such as knowing you need to pick your kids up early on a Tuesday, and the day-to-day variations for doctor’s appointments, emergencies and so on. Most commonly, people were using flexible work through discussions with their managers. They were keeping discussions open about their changing needs, which was particularly useful around fluctuating health.
If that stays the same—it might not, if the Employment Rights Act is super successful and people take it on board and give it a chance—we might expect not to see such dramatic changes. It would probably mainly be utilised by disabled people who had not been able to achieve reasonable adjustments through non-statutory processes.
The point I am making is that it is great that we are trying to make it easier to access flexible work in a statutory way, but we should not overlook the very real benefits of informal flexible working. Employers saw this as a way of being inclusive and looking at different kinds of worker needs, because they did not regard the statutory mechanism as giving them the kind of trial and security they were after.
Q68 Kim Leadbeater: One final point from me. You mentioned ACAS. How do you think bodies such as ACAS or the EHRC could work together to ensure a system that supports the flexible working needs of disabled people, as well as the broader workforce? Do you think there is a role for them?
Professor Parry: Yes, in terms of signposting this clear journey, so people do not make mistakes they cannot afford to make in accessing reasonable adjustments: what they need to ask for, what route applies to them, and what happens if an arrangement is refused or needs to change. It is about empowering them. Of course, within that, it is also important to preserve the role of informal dialogue, while underpinning it with clear rights and guidance.
Q69 Kevin McKenna: You talked a little while ago about some of the practical and physical aids and equipment that can be used to support people in the workplace, like standing desks, which I have always been a big fan of—and yes, they are always in short supply. Obviously, the Government have the Access to Work scheme, but it is pretty clear from the Government’s own point of view that it is likely to be unsustainable in the long term, and maybe even the short term. If we did not have a scheme like Access to Work helping employers supply this equipment, what would be the impact on people with disabilities?
Dr Holland: I think a lot of disabled people would be out of work and the disability employment gap would be even wider than it is already. It is an absolutely critical service. Yes, there are lots of things wrong with it, but when it works, it is the difference between people being in work or not being in work. Some need help getting to work. Some need help talking to people at work. You mentioned aids and equipment; some of that is essential to get the job done.
I know the costs have gone up since the pandemic, and this data is a little old, but the scheme is cost-effective. Professor Chung mentioned returns: it is £1.14 for every £1 spent. Unemployment is expensive to the state, and expensive to individuals, because it worsens health and wellbeing, which has knock-on costs for the NHS. If people are not in work, they will ask for benefits. The Government need to decide: do they want disabled people in work or not? It is that blunt. Do you want them paying tax, or asking for universal credit and other benefits?
The Disability Policy Centre said that without Access to Work, health care and welfare costs would be at least £6 million on top of the running costs of Access to Work. Withdrawing it would be expensive. We know demand has gone up since the pandemic, and that, in response, there have been cuts to support, which have caused a lot of distress. People are saying they are losing work and that they cannot always maintain it.
The National Audit Office investigation said it is worried employers will be deterred from employing disabled people because they are aware there is a crisis with Access to Work at the moment. Action on Disability said that, among the disabled people it supports, job retention has halved since 2022. We are in crisis mode.
Yes, the scheme is expensive, but the alternatives are worse and more expensive. We need to redesign it with disabled people and disabled people’s organisations, because they are the experts. We can give our input as academics, but the real experts are disabled people—the users of the scheme—and those who would like to use it but have been put off by bureaucracy, waiting lists and everything else.
Disabled people and disabled people’s organisations need to work with DWP and other Government agencies to redesign the scheme, because there are lots of inefficiencies. The National Audit Office did an investigation into Access to Work, and the report is really interesting. It describes a lot of the operational inefficiencies in the system, and the impact of those on disabled people. I found that very enlightening.
Some examples of those inefficiencies were people being sent emails from “no-reply” email addresses. A decision is made by an Access to Work assessor, and then there is no right to reply; you can only imagine the stress that that is going to cause. And even though it is a digital application system, people are being asked to supply hard-copy documents, provide wet signatures and then post them, even though their impairments mean that they cannot do that. Deaf people are saying, “I can’t answer the phone,” but Access to Work advisers insist on phoning them rather than emailing them.
A cynic might ask, “Is this being done on purpose to actually put people off?” I hope not. As I say, when it works, it is brilliant, but I have spoken to lots of people in my study who have actually been put off ever reapplying or getting involved with this scheme again. It is wonderful when it works; as I say, it is the difference between people being in work and not being in work, but it definitely needs redesigning, and the important people in the room for that will be disabled people and disabled people’s organisations.
Q70 Kevin McKenna: Is there also something in, because the support is going to the individual, it helping to offset some of the challenges that SMEs face compared with large-scale employers?
Dr Holland: Sorry, can you—
Kevin McKenna: Obviously, large-scale employers have more resources—kit, equipment and all sorts of other support. Does it help SMEs particularly, in comparison with larger employers?
Dr Holland: Absolutely. In our study, like I say, only 53% of people had had all their adjustments put in place. I think that people in large organisations were much more likely to have them, and in the qualitative interviews, when we asked who had paid for them, people in large organisations were much more likely to say, “Actually, my employer paid for them.” An interesting thing about the National Audit Office report was that it said that some of the support provided should be given by employers.
That is another thing: it is about educating employers about what they should be providing and what Access to Work can pick up. Of course, we cannot expect Access to Work to supply everything. We have talked about universal design, and there is a responsibility, if you are employing someone, to make the workplace inclusive and ensure that it works for that person. But, of course, Access to Work has a role in picking up that kind of surplus. As you say, SMEs sometimes do not have the funding to provide some of the higher-cost adjustments that are needed.
Q71 Kevin McKenna: I think your commitment to co-designing and bringing in the voices of disabled people and their organisations is extremely laudable and correct, but I am sure that you have opinions yourself. In particular, what changes and redesign options would you really want to see for Access to Work to make it sustainable in the long term?
Dr Holland: I can’t speak to sustainability, apart from the inefficiencies that I have just mentioned, but it must be redesigned so that it is needs-led. At the moment, it is demand-led—people apply for funding—but not needs-led. We can see that just from the fact that people’s awards have been cut, but they are still disabled; they have not told anybody, “My health has improved,” or, “My impairment has disappeared,” yet their support is being cut. That is definitely not needs-led. Of course, making it needs-led will require further investment. One of the greatest cuts has been to support worker hours, which has left a lot of people in deep distress and unable to fulfil their function at work.
I think strides have been made to make it easier to transfer awards from job to job, but people are still saying that it is a bit difficult. That should be made easier, because we do not want people having to reapply when they want to take on a new job, either to move into better work or different work. Otherwise, that will put employers off, if they know that there will be a delay.
The delays are another issue because they are making people anxious, and people are losing job offers because they are having to wait for so long. Somebody was talking about this on LinkedIn: they had spoken to an Access to Work adviser this month and were told, “Well, we’re still working through October’s applications.” We are now in September.
Imagine an employer who has two people, where everything else is equal—both brilliant candidates—but one of them is waiting on an Access to Work order; it is awful, isn’t it? But some people will be in that situation, where they are losing jobs.
Professor Wheatley: I have a few comments on how to improve the scheme. We submitted separate written evidence to the Access to Work inquiry, and we outlined several things.
The first is to improve the accessibility of the application processes, including the online portal, which is not hugely accessible. That builds on some of the points that Paula made about how the process works in terms of the practices that are engaged with—phone calls, written signatures and all those things. Streamlining that process would massively enhance the accessibility of the process, but it would also make it more efficient.
Secondly, we suggest using AI-supported triage to reduce waiting lists and ease the caseload on caseworkers. One of the things that the investigation that Paula mentioned uncovered is that the retention rate for caseworkers is really low. You have caseworkers going off on long-term illness; you have caseworkers who may themselves be disabled; you have caseworkers who are leaving their jobs. That creates more gaps and inefficiencies in the system. Keeping hold of those caseworkers and keeping them healthy is really important. Looking at ways of taking some of those initial, basic, preliminary tasks and using things like AI and automation tools to support that makes sense.
The next thing is enhanced training and support for caseworkers to provide more of a menu of options. There is almost an underlying assumption that people need to know what they need. People don’t know what they need. If someone has recently become disabled, they will not know what they need. If a new assistive technology becomes available, how will they know about that? Again, the onus on the individual is too great. Providing a better menu of options would support better outcomes and probably also increase efficiency, because it would help with matching what people need to what is available.
Awareness campaigns are really important. Interestingly, the Government are worried about the costs of the scheme, but it is not actually used that much. In our study, we had several people refer to it as a secret Government fund that they felt they did not know about; they only heard through other disabled people they engaged with that it was available. I suggest that in the short term the fund actually needs more investment.
As Paula mentioned, the return on investment evidences that the scheme is generating a beneficial outcome—it is generating more benefit than cost—so it should not be seen as financially unsustainable. Any other Government investment that generates more benefit than cost would surely not be seen as financially unsustainable. Investing more in the scheme and getting more disabled people into employment and supporting them in employment is surely the positive way forward for this scheme.
Dr Holland: Can I add one more thing? Leading on from what Dan said, we really need a proper evaluation. We know the return on investment is sound, but we need to evaluate its impact on disabled people’s employment and health and their income, on the disability employment gap and the disability pay gap, and on NHS and welfare spending. We need a full, holistic evaluation.
Q72 Kevin McKenna: It has never had a comprehensive evaluation?
Dr Holland: Not to that degree, no.
Q73 Rachel Taylor: Professor Wheatley, you have mentioned AI and how that can be useful. To what extent can assistive technologies, including those driven by AI, help increase flexible working opportunities for disabled people?
Professor Wheatley: In our study, AI-EMPOWERED, we highlighted the huge potential of AI in this arena. We found that AI supports much greater personalisation and flexibility in people’s jobs, both through assistive technologies that are powered by AI and through the AI that disabled people use as an assistive technology; often, those are quite off-the-shelf generative AI tools—household names—that they adapt to their own needs. In combination, we found that AI allows people to fill gaps in capabilities and to create space for them to utilise the expertise and talent they have more effectively.
AI assistive technology has progressed massively in recent years. Things like computer vision technology, auto-transcription tools and audio description tools have all improved hugely. Some of that development, including things like auto-transcription and audio description developments, happened throughout the pandemic, with remote and hybrid working, but AI has powered a lot of them to progress and improve, and the accuracy of these tools—screen readers and things like that—has improved significantly. That is really important for disabled people because, coming back to some of the entrenched perceptions around disabled people, with respect to productivity levels and things like that, if we can use digital technologies as a tool to support productivity, that will hopefully, over time, dissolve some of those perceptions and evidence that, given the right resources and tools to do the job, disabled people can be just as productive as any other worker.
In our study, we identified really mixed levels of awareness and engagement with AI, and significant variation in adoption levels. Large organisations, of course, have been quite early and quite heavy AI adopters, driven by their resource, dedicated IT functions and so on. SMEs are an interesting case: a lot of very small organisations have been quick to adopt AI because they see it as a way of leveraging a competitive advantage in the market; they can pull in AI tools and make them more efficient and agile. It is in medium-sized organisations where there seems to be a big gap in AI capabilities. Those organisations, as we have already discussed in terms of SMEs and the situation for disabled people anyway, are where more support is needed in understanding how AI can be deployed in a way that can support disabled people. Again, we are talking about both assistive technologies and more off-the-shelf AI tools that disabled people can use as assistive technologies and personalise to their needs.
Q74 Rachel Taylor: Even where employers have adopted AI, do you think they are as aware as they could be of the potential for supporting disabled people into work?
Professor Wheatley: Not in a lot of cases. A lot of organisations are adopting AI in quite piecemeal ways. They are taking off-the-shelf AI tools, and some of them are developing much more advanced, bespoke tools, but often for very specific purposes or, at the flip end of that, with no real strategic focus; they are just doing it because everyone else is doing it. In either case, the discussion is not always around how it can help different groups of workers. Bringing disabled people into that conversation—making sure that you have disabled representation within organisations and that there are governance systems—is hugely important. This includes a role for central Government in promoting the use of AI and helping organisations upskill in terms of how AI can be used and deployed, in many cases, as a form of reasonable adjustment and a way of supporting disabled people to work to their best.
Q75 Rachel Taylor: How concerned should we be about the risks of AI-based recruitment processes to disabled people’s employment opportunities? Should the Government take action on that?
Professor Chung: I want to talk a little more broadly about the impact of AI on the labour market. It is still early days. ChatGPT was released only a few years ago. We are seeing predictions of what will happen to the labour market—we saw one by Bill Gates just the other day—and we are seeing some of the evidence coming out now. We have seen that AI has huge potential for enhancing productivity, and if that productivity gain is distributed across the population, we could really come to a utopian labour market where people have more time and are able to really focus on wellbeing and so on. But we are seeing that it is also increasing the destruction of jobs and increasing competition for jobs. A lot of people are losing jobs—especially young entrants to the graduate market but elsewhere as well—and the people who remain are having their jobs intensified or having lots of issues around that.
In addition, we are seeing differences in the population with regard to access to AI equipment, because obviously some of this technology—especially the more advanced AI technology—incurs costs. As you mentioned, there are the recruitment processes as well. We have seen evidence of the ideal worker norm that we spoke about earlier in the hearing—this able-bodied and work-devoted person without any responsibilities outside of work—being used in recruitment processes or AI tools without even the employers themselves understanding it. It is embedded in the systems, which will discriminate not only against disabled workers but against workers with caring responsibilities and so on. That could potentially enhance the gap, but it is still early days and, again, this is one of those areas that we need more evidence on and we need to look into a bit more.
Professor Wheatley: I have spoken to a couple of organisations that provide these automated recruitment tools, and the important thing to recognise is that what you put into it is what you get out of it, as is often the case with technology. If you put in biases, you will get out biases. If you put in flags for gaps in CVs, or non-standard educational or employment backgrounds, as things that you do not want, that will necessarily discriminate against people who have those things present on their CVs.
If you put in place good rules and inputs—again, there is a kind of educational component to this that is central—these systems can actually reduce bias and discrimination. The massive risk, as Heejung just said, is that they perpetuate existing biases in society. In an increasingly competitive labour market, where employers will put up a job advertisement and get thousands of applications literally within seconds because AI tools apply for jobs for candidates, the risk is that anyone who does not have a typical CV—anyone who is atypical in any way—will be screened out of the process at the very early stages.
Evidence-based research needs to be done on the impact of automated tools being used in recruitment processes. The impact on the labour market could be massive, but it is really not known; it is very anecdotal at the minute.
Professor Chung: The other thing is that there are companies selling these tools—not necessarily intentionally—with these inherent biases, but a lot of companies using them do not necessarily even understand what is embedded in them.
The other side of it is that now we are hearing from employers who, because online job markets are generating just too many applications, are going back to network-based job recruitment processes, which again will limit certain people, including disabled people, who do not have the social networks and social capital to rely on. Again, that can increase inequality patterns.
Professor Parry: The Business and Trade Committee have been running an inquiry on AI in the workforce. I believe they were interested in detrimental impacts of recruitment, so that might be worth cross-referencing.
Chair: Thank you very much. Unless anybody has anything else to add or to ask, that concludes the session. Thank you very much to our witnesses for coming along today.