Scottish Disability Equality Forum

Specialist Disability Employment Programmes

The Department for Work and Pensions have been conducting a consultation into Specialist Disability Employment Programmes.

These are designed to help disabled people find and keep jobs. They include things like Access to Work and Remploy.  The Government are revising their policies after a review carried out by Liz Sayce, chief executive of the organisation RADAR. She prepared a report called ‘Getting in, staying in and getting on’. This discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the different programmes and made some recommendations.

The some of the main recommendations are:

- To increase awareness of Access to Work
- To cut funding from Remploy to fund improvements in Access to Work
- Closure of Remploy factories
- Opportunity for employees of Remploy factories to take over the business
- Remploy Employment Services to be sold and run free of Government control

You can read the SDEF briefing for more information.

Many disabled people’s organisations believe the Government should support disabled people to find jobs across all sectors of the economy and not just in protected factories. The Sayce Report gives this as a reason to support closing Remploy factories.

SDEF have now submitted our response to this consultation. We carried out a survey of our members and received a lot of interesting feedback.

There was almost a 50-50 split for and against the Government proposals.

Many people support the principle that disabled people should be actively supported to find jobs in all sectors of the economy, therefore the Government should prioritise Access to Work. Many others believe that in times of economic hardship the current employees of Remploy must be supported to stay in their jobs.

Our full response is now available online.