A leading UK employers’ group is to urge businesses to pay more attention to disability issues in their corporate responsibility initiatives.
The Employers Forum for Disability – which promotes better recruitment, retention and training of disabled people among its members – will argue in a forthcoming report that many companies have done little about disability issues, even though they may have made good progress on other aspects of equal opportunities.
The report, by Simon Zadek and Susan Scott-Parker, will argue that ‘the core disability business case is no different fundamentally from the business case which drives the need to develop truly diverse workforces and which underpins robust corporate social responsibility policies.’
It will call on socially responsible companies to tackle disability issues with as much determination as they have other areas such as the environment, human rights and working conditions.
The report will also suggest that corporate progress on disability has been slow partly because many of those working within the corporate responsibility field have limited direct experience of disability.
The Forum, whose members employ 20 per cent of the UK workforce, is likely to recommend that employers should carry out more disability awareness and equality training and set up twinning arrangements with disability organizations to ensure that they have direct knowledge of disability.
David Grayson, chairman of the National Disability Council, said there were some examples of enlightened companies working on disability. B&Q, for example, had introduced disability awareness training. But he added: ‘I would still put disability at a relatively early stage in terms of the responsible business movement. It must be more proactive.’
In a recent speech to the RSA Ethics Forum, Grayson argued that ‘most of those now working in the corporate social responsibility field have not come from, or had direct personal experience of, disability’.
As a consequence, disability was the ‘Cinderella issue for the responsible business movement’.