Scotland's Councils miss equality targets in employment of disabled people - no officials or elected members resign

 As has been done several times since the Equality Act took effect in 2010 and Scotland put in place regulations on how public bodies should comply with the Act, Equality Here, Now has waded through 32 Council reports to find out just how far Councils, as employers, have managed to eliminate discrimination.  This latest audit, the 5th since 2010, looked at Council Mainstreaming Equality reports published in 2021.  The fine detail of the 2022 research findings can be read here.

Using data published by Councils themselves, at 2021 the total workforce of Councils across Scotland was 265,030 employees. Of these, 6,347 [2.39%] identified as disabled, 147,573 [55.68%] identified as non-disabled and 111,110 [41.92%] did not reveal their disability status. The latest population data from Scottish Government’s Equality Evidence Finder is that 32% of all adults were disabled [as at 2017].  

Most Councils indicated that their goal was to have a workforce profile which reflected the profile of the population served by the Council.  The research constructed a league table using Census 2011 data and the workforce data published by Councils.  This is reproduced below.

This reveals that there are over 45,000 disabled people missing from all of Scotland's Council workforces, almost 7 times the actual total currently employed.  The City of Glasgow Council is the worst offender, with 5,603 disabled people missing.

At the present rate of progress in increasing the number of disabled people employed, Councils in Scotland will, collectively, take over 470 years to reach a level of employment of disabled people which matches the level of disabled people living in their communities. 

Reaching such a milestone will not, however, ensure that employment equality [by headcount] will be delivered for people who identify as having visual impairment and blindness, or hearing impairment and deafness, or physical disabilities such as congenital conditions, or long-term injuries caused by accidents, or progressive neuromuscular diseases, or respiratory conditions or immunological conditions, or neurological conditions and brain injuries. That would require Councils to gather and use employment data on each of these particular cohorts of disabled people in their approach to better performing the general equality duty. None of Scotland’s 32 Councils has started to do that.

The research and findings, including the actual performance against benchmark as shown in the table above, was shared with Chief Executives and Leaders of Councils.  A small minority of the Chief Executive or Leaders responded, with most recognising that their performance in eliminating employment discrimination is poor but failing to offer any bold, radical or new initiatives which will close the equality gaps for disabled people in their Councils.

It is interesting to note that even in the face of the sustained failure of Councils to deliver employment equality for disabled people, not one official and not one elected member has taken responsibility for it and resigned.  Which perhaps offers a compelling illustration of a fundamental flaw in the law on eliminating discrimination.  Not one person is required to resign, voluntarily or by collective corporate action, when failure on the scale of Glasgow City Council is revealed.  The sense is clear that corporate and cultural responsibility for delivering equality rests all-too lightly on the shoulders of senior figures in Scotland's public sector.