Royal Mail has signed a deal with the government to help make it easier for the organisation to employ disabled people.
The Access to Work initiative currently helps thousands of workers and their employers to overcome barriers resulting from disability by offering practical advice and funding.
Royal Mail will build on the scheme by creating a dedicated national team which will respond to managers’ questions relating to the recruitment or the ongoing needs of disabled employees.
It is hoped that Royal Mail’s pilot will streamline the process considerably, encouraging other businesses to invest in similar, simplified arrangements.
Kay Allen, head of social policy and inclusion at Royal Mail, said: “Facilitating the employment of disabled workers is a key priority for us as a diversity-aware business. The best way to do this is to make it as easy as possible for our people to become “disability confident”.
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“We’re aiming to use this pilot to demonstrate new ways in which large employers can take advantage of the Access to Work scheme, helping to ease some of the country’s 3.3 million economically inactive disabled people into work.”
More than 11 million people in the UK are estimated to have some kind of impairment.
