Dr. Amy Hassett:

The Deputy's point about the Civil Service needing to lead is incredibly important. There are two angles to this. The first is that there was an intention to have disabled people comprise 3% of the Civil Service. In the most recent strategy, that was increased to 6%. Some 22% of the population is disabled, and the Civil Service is only putting an expectation on itself to meet 6%. There needs to be more ambition within the Civil Service to increase the number of disabled people working within it. It does create different difficulties because certain structures and programmes like Work and Access are for private companies rather than the public service, so there is a lack of understanding. There is complexity around how to access different supports depending on which side of industry you are in.

There needs to be much more focus not only on how we get disabled people into employment in the Civil Service but also on how we ensure those people are able to move up through the ranks. We have decent programmes for getting disabled people into employment in the Civil Service - I think they could be more ambitious - but there is no system to track the progress of these people upwards through the Civil Service. The problem is that disabled people are over-represented in the entry-level positions and they are not climbing the ranks. The Civil Service could be thinking about how it can do more and support disabled people more in terms of progressing through the ranks.