National Disability Strategy

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has expressed disappointment with the new National Disability Strategy recently unveiled by the Department for Work and Pensions.

While welcoming some elements, the FSB said that helping disabled people in the workplace needs to be a higher priority, and that more could be done with existing schemes, such as Kickstart, to boost the number of disabled people in work. It also felt that the Access to Work strategy could be developed further so that disabled people have the equipment they need when starting a new job.

FSB National Chair Mike Cherry added: “The failure of our whole country to do more to support disabled people to prosper is a moral and economic disaster. Small businesses already employ a disproportionally higher number of disabled people compared to the rest of the private sector, but we think far more could and should be done to increase disabled employment across all workplaces.”