Ms Siobhán McKenna:

I am not going to get many opportunities like this. I would like to see more resources in the Civil Service for people who are from under-represented groups, such as marketing budgets, so that we can go out and actually spend money to get to know these stakeholder groups and win their confidence because that is what this is about. It is about getting communities that have not looked in our direction before to come and look in our direction. We can then tell they are welcome and this is what we can do for them.

We had a great school programme reaching 16- and 17-year-olds to plant that seed about careers in the civil and public sector, which was just not on the radar for many people. There are some overarching policy changes. We need to move from the medical model to the social model. We all speak in the social model, but our processes are still in the medical model. We ask disabled people for reports to prove, in effect, they are disabled. We do not ask non-disabled people to prove they are not disabled because of the small percentage of people who might abuse the system and get an extra 15 minutes. The Government needs to be wary about that, but there has to be a better way of taking that burden off people who are disabled and putting it onto the system in order to build that trust with people.

We have very high declaration rates for people sharing their disability with us and the accommodations we can provide them. Where it breaks down is when we have to pass it on to the hiring managers because they do not necessarily have that level of trust with a random stranger they have never met before in a Department in which that person is going to go and work. Like most humans, these people want to sit down face-to-face and tell the managers they have had mental health issues in the past or need to see a consultant three times per year. I understand that. It can be really challenging, however. People end up in jobs they cannot do and the system should have known better. The people in the system are trying really hard, but our system sometimes makes it really difficult for us to get the right person in the right job in the Civil Service, whether or not they have a disability, I might add. It is particularly challenging.