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Stephen Simpson examines an employer's duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled employees during the course of their recruitment and employment. He discusses 10 different types of adjustments that a business could make in order to comply with the legislation.
Adjustments for a disability do not have to cost the earth or require employers to make major changes to their workplace environment or policies and procedures. Here are 10 examples of discrimination cases and a summary of the straightforward reasonable adjustments that could have been made.
Disability discrimination laws place an active duty on employers to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate the needs of disabled employees. This duty arises at any time before, during or after the employment relationship when the employer puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage in comparison with individuals who are not disabled.
1. Reallocation of a duty a disabled employee cannot do
An NHS trust discriminated against a deaf applicant for a position when it failed to consider reallocating telephone work, according to the employment tribunal in Keane v United Lincolnshire Hospital NHS Trust.
2. Providing a nearby parking space for a disabled worker
In Environment Agency v Donnelly, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) held that an employer's refusal to allocate a parking space near to the workplace of a disabled employee was a breach of its duty to make reasonable adjustments. The employer's suggestion that the employee should arrive earlier at work to ensure a convenient parking space was wrongly placing the responsibility for making the necessary adjustment on the disabled person.
3. Providing a piece of equipment
West v Lewis t/a Squires Model & Craft Tools is a good example of an employer committing disability discrimination by failing to make a simple and inexpensive adjustment for a disabled employee. A shop worker who had undergone a hip operation had requested numerous times that the company provide her with a stool behind the shop counter, so that she could sit from time to time to ease her pain.
A. Swapping two pieces of equipment
In George v H and M Bottomley Ltd, the employment tribunal found that the employer failed to make the reasonable adjustment of providing a van with powerassisted steering that it had available so...