Employment: Disability
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of requiring employers to respond to reasonable adjustment requests from disabled workers within two weeks.
Answered by Sir Stephen Timms
The Equality Act 2010 (the Act) protects disabled people against unlawful direct or indirect discrimination in employment, including by placing a duty on employers to make, on request, reasonable adjustments to any element of a job, job application or interview process, which may place disabled people at a substantial disadvantage compared to non-disabled people.
There are no current plans to amend the reasonable adjustments duty in the Act. In most cases, it is fairer to apply a “reasonableness” test which enables each situation to be considered on its merits, rather than impose rigid, universal requirements on employers and service providers. Where an employer takes an unreasonably long time to make a decision on a reasonable adjustment request, this omission could, of itself, potentially be considered a failure to make the adjustment, which could in turn be actionable by the affected person at an employment tribunal.
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