Pilots Following the evaluation of pilots in the Yorkshire and the Humber Region and the London Head Office Estate the procedures for managing the assessment and provision of reasonable adjustments for staff with disabilities have changed from 1 April 2009. This bulletin summarises the changes and detailed guidance can be found on the DWP intranet under HR, Diversity and Equality, Reasonable Adjustments.
Problems with RA provision
Disabled staff and PCS reps will be aware of the difficulties experienced over the years where the procedures and contracts have been an obstacle to providing staff with acceptable, appropriate assessment and adjustments in a timely manner. PCS has often resorted to using employment tribunals in order to enable the provision of reasonable adjustments and the tribunals have been critical of DWP policies as an employer. This has put pressure on DWP in particular as it is the public body changed with enabling employers to help keep and get disabled staff into work. Managers have also expressed concern at the amount of special leave with pay they have had to fund during these unacceptable delays.
Reasonable Adjustments Specialist Team (RAST) service
All reasonable adjustment requests will now be managed by a central DWP team based in Sheffield. Line managers will be responsible for identifying those staff with disabilities that require adjustments but will now pass these (except where simple adjustments can be made by the manager) onto the RAST service to manage the process. This is a significant and welcome change as it removes all the restrictive criteria used in the pilots where for example only “severe, chronic and progressive cases” were passed onto the RAST service.
No changes to contracts
PCS have been consulted on these changes and hope to see an improvement in the provision of reasonable adjustments. However there are no changes to the contracting out of assessments (ATOS) and provision of furniture/equipment (Trillium) and IT equipment following the pilot. PCS are concerned about reports that the changes made to the ATOS/Trillium contracts last year, on how and who conducts workplace assessments have increased assessment and delivery times leading to yet further delays in provision. We are firmly committed to pursuing a policy of provision either by, or as good as our own (in house) staff from the Access to Work Teams in line with conference 2007 motion A227.
The changes to the management of RA provision outlined above will allow the RAST teams to progress and monitor provision in order to give them a clear picture on a national scale and feed this back into contract management in order to achieve any contractual changes required.
Advice for reps
These changes will impact on how PCS represent members going through this process, at present local mangers know who representatives are and can easily verify they have the authority to access documents on the members’ behalf. As the process will be managed remotely reps may have to get written authority from members in order to obtain this information, in particular internal notes not automatically given to members.
Reps should feed back any problems and requests for advice through their PCS branch equality rep or branch H&S officer who will in turn pass this to regional or group officers as appropriate.
