 Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Paul MacLennan, MSP, a member of the Parliaments, Social Justice and Social Security Committee, and I would like to welcome you to the 2022 festival politics organised by the Scottish Parliament. This year, we celebrate the festival's 18th year of provoking, inspiring and informing people of all ages and from every work of life to engage in three days of spirited debate. We are delighted that you can join us today online to participate in this debate on disability and the future of work, and I would encourage you all to use the question and answer box to introduce yourselves, sitting your first name only in geographical location. You can also use that box to pose any questions you would like the panel to respond to. If you're keen to share your thoughts on social media, you can do so by using the hashtag FOP 2022. I'm very pleased today to be joined by an expert panel. Let me introduce him. Our first panelist is Bella Gore. Bella is head of legal and content with Business Disability Forum, a lawyer with over 20 years experience of disability discrimination law, including she has provided lead reviews and improvement processes for many organisations, including banks and government agencies. Moving on, Professor Phil Taylor is Professor of Work and Employment Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He has researched and published widely on many subjects including the future of work, occupational health and Covid-19. Our next panelist is Naomi Watt. Naomi has worked for Inclusion Scotland for six years. An expert in accessible recruitment practices and workplace adjustments. Naomi manages the National Week in Work Internships programme, which aims to make employment more accessible for disabled people. Finally, Sathpal Singh is an independent consultant in agile delivery and digital transformation. A former software engineer, he has over 20 years experience of management and leadership roles across the public, private and voluntary sectors. He is also one of lead organisers in the future of work in Scotland, a community meet-up group exploring how work and the workplace are changing. I would also like to welcome and thank our BSL interpreters, Max Greig and Heather Graham, who are working with us today. Welcome all. Just to set a little bit of the scene about what the event is all around about today, I'm aware that many of our audience will have direct personal experience of the issues. I'll be keen to bring in questions and thoughts from you all. If you'd like to put anything into our panel, please use the Q&A function that you'll see. I'm going to start by asking a couple of questions. I want to ask first about how work in general is changing, particularly since the Covid pandemic. I'm going to go first to Professor Taylor and then to Sathpal. Phil, you've done research on how the pandemic changed the experience of work for people. What changed and how is the world of work different now from three years ago? That is a $64,000 million question and a very important one because what Covid has done has transformed work in many essential respects for millions of people. I conducted a study of, and this is probably one of the most important manifestations, isn't it? One of the outcomes of working from home. I researched almost three and a half thousand office workers and there's no question that what we saw from March 2020 onwards was an abrupt, involuntary, forced change, if you like, where we saw the transposition of the office to people's working homes. Prior to the pandemic, only 5 per cent of people had worked mainly from home. That rose to 46 per cent. We're now currently in a situation where the latest figures show 14 per cent are exclusively working from home and 25 per cent in hybrid arrangement. This is a momentous change. What we know from this and from what my evidence shows is that this is not the case that has led to somehow autonomous slacking by people at home, but in fact the third of people report that the volume intensity and pace and pressure of work at home has intensified. We have, and this is interesting in terms of new technology and automation in the future of work, extensive monitoring. 45 per cent say that automated systems are monitoring their work at home. There's evidence, too, of increasing presenteeism when people are working from home. They're more likely to work when ill at home as opposed to going to the workplace. What does this mean very quickly? We have seen a rise, unfortunately, in work-related stress, depression and anxiety through this period. There are many more cases. There are 822,000 cases across the UK now. Over half of them say that this has been attributed by the pandemic or related to it. Why does this matter? It matters massively to disabled people. For one thing, we found that when working from home, things such as ergonomic posture and working environment have to support people yet 55 per cent of my respondents said that they did not get reminders about display screen equipment regulations. That is to say the adjustments that are necessary for disabled people to be able to make work safe and comfortable at home. I'll finish on this point. There are other issues that I can raise later. In total, 37 per cent of my surveyed said that physical health had worsened across the pandemic and 40 per cent said that mental health had worsened. Some had increased, but reporting that it had worsened was greater than those who had said that it had improved. Those are extremely important questions. There are other cultural shifts that I'd like to talk about later on. I'm going to bring in the second point that you made. One of the key issues, certainly from the Social Justice Committee, is people who have disabilities at the moment coming into the workplace or coming back to the workplace. Have you found that home working has any difference in bringing people back to the workplace at all, or is that something that you have evidence on at this stage? One important piece of evidence that comes out of my extensive studies is the fact that, where transportation and travel to work mutes and so on, this has been a benefit for many disabled people being able to work from home. It's not a complete benefit because there are those ergonomic considerations of working from home, our risk assessments conducted and so on, but travel to work would appear to be one area that seemed to have benefited. There is a huge question that I wish to throw in at the very beginning. That is that we have a situation where the latest figures show that 270,000 fewer people are in employment now than before the pandemic. These are all UK figures. It's not automation that is doing this. There are disability implications here because it would appear that long Covid is taking... ...has taken quite a lot of people out of the workforce and is leading to premature retirement and so on. Contradictorily, there is evidence from the last fortnight that some of those who have left the workforce, many of them disabled by long Covid, are now considering or returning to the workforce because of the cost of living crisis that they simply cannot afford to be outside of paid employment. Thank you for that. I'm sure that we'll touch on those subjects as a discussion debate. Safbal, I'm going to bring yourself in terms of that. In your work, do you look at broader trends in work? Do those changes fit into a longer-term trend or what are the key changes in the work that you're seeing? I agree with some of what Phil covered there. I think that the key thing is that remote working is not going to go away. In my industry, I'm already used to not being very comfortable working in that way because I'm in technology. I work for large global enterprises and a lot of people that I collaborate with typically are not the same countries as me or, in some cases, the same continents. I'm very comfortable with that, but we've certainly seen a huge shift there, as many of us experienced. We've gone from co-located working environments to distributed working environments, which is what I was typically used to. Right through to disperse, we were all in our own homes and we're trying to find ways to collaborate. I think that we've proven that we can work effectively from home. A lot of organisations have had to effectively change their strategies in a hurry. As Phil said, we've been disrupted. It's been aggressive. We've had to respond quickly and adapt to those things to sustain ourselves and keep things going. We've learned a lot by doing that, but we've proven that it's workable. In many cases, I think that a lot of people, certainly in my industries, we can and typically are more productive. The flip side of that is that Phil touched on a moment ago on wellbeing, watching the hours that we work and the cultural things that we're seeing creeping in. I'm sure that we'll come back to some of that. I think that the automation piece that was touched on earlier is important because we're now dispersed and a lot of us aren't physically going back to offices. In some cases, some industries will be further disrupted because the contactless nature of work will kick in. I want to introduce more self-service-type products and services, which you can ultimately only really do through greater automation and adoption of artificial intelligence, for example. Those trends are going to continue and amplify over the coming decade or so. I'm going to bring in Bella and Naomi just in a little second. One question that's posed for me is, are you noticing the difference in the move from home working? Has it been the same for smaller companies as against the larger companies? Has there been any differences that you're finding in that? Or has it been as easy to move to home working for the smaller organisations that might have three, four, five people rather than some that might have two or three thousand people, for example? It's definitely different. To be honest, it will depend on a number of things. One of them will be size. Obviously, smaller organisations can do that much more quickly and much more readily than larger global enterprises, such as my employer. However, I think that a lot of it will also depend on culture and what kind of work you're in. I'm sure that we'll come back to explore that later. But I think that sector and type of occupation and the necessity of geographical proximity to the people you're serving, if you're in a more of a customer-facing type of environment, will have implications for where you need to be and how you need to work. As I mentioned earlier, the key thing here is that there have been a lot of positives out of this, too, because organisations have had to accelerate their technology strategies and digital transformations to continue to sustain themselves and survive and continue to operate in whatever market they're in. I think that there's some good out of that. There's quite a lot of impact to impact there, really. I'm sure that we'll get into that discussion in a broader context. Sathpal, thank you for that. With that context, I want to focus a little bit more on the experience of disabled people in particular. I'm going to go to Bella first in Naomi. Bella, what are the key barriers to disabled people getting into employment? And what opportunities do you see, I suppose, from the changes outlined by both Phil and Sathpal? I think that three A's come to mind. Assumptions, attitudes and adjustments. By assumptions, I mean assumptions about who disabled people are, what they can do, but also what they want. Just reflecting on what Phil was saying, transportation. Yes, a lot of disabled people did want to work from home prior to the pandemic, and it was the most requested reasonable adjustment. It was often refused for reasons that the pandemic has proved not to be viable. It is perfectly possible to do. On the other hand, I've spoken to lots of disabled people who don't want to work from home. They want to come into the office. They want to work with other people. There's a real mental health challenge for some people for being isolated. Also, it isn't to let transport providers off the hook in making transportation accessible for disabled people because if it's an assumption that every disabled person who's got a mobility disability, a mobility-related disability can work from home, then we trap people because they can't go out for leisure either. It's an assumption that people keep in their homes and they can do a job and they're productive and that's all that matters. I think that there's some assumptions around that and attitudes as well that go with that. Attitudes about what disabled people can do and what can change in the workplace, that things don't have to be done the way that they were always done, the pandemic proved that to be the case. By adjustments, I don't mean special equipment or special things for special people. I've got quote marks there on the special because it's that attitude of we are all individuals and I think it's moving on from that slightly 19th century review that we've got standardised workplaces with standardised equipment and the one size fits all and it doesn't. I mean I said earlier I'm sort of very small and four foot ten. Why would I have wanted the same chair or keyboard or desk as somebody who's six foot two? It's always been the case that we're different but in the past employers have tried to fit us into a standardised box and I think maybe this is an opportunity for that flexibility to recognise that people are individuals regardless of disability. Bella, thank you for that. I'm going to ask Naomi just in a little second the same question. I suppose the key thing, Bella, you mentioned about everybody's different and so on. Are businesses and government agencies, for example, engaging with people with disabilities enough or does that need to be looked at even more in terms of that? Is that something in your role? Are you seeing that? I think disability is having a moment but our members and business disability forum members are on the large side. They're large corporates, large government agencies, very much so disabled people's voices in ERGs or staff disability networks are coming through. I'm not so sure about smaller employers which are the majority of course and particularly in Scotland. I do think that disability might be having a bit of a moment again in air quotes in our cultural life. On baking contests or dancing contests on television, on Google box, you see disabled people but I don't know that it's actually Naomi will probably answer this better. I don't see that translating into employment because the disability employment gap stays stubbornly high. What is happening with that? We see disabled people advertising now and they're recognised. We're seeing people like us who are more recognised but not coming through in the employment rates. Naomi, on the same question, what are the key barriers and opportunities that we had? Is there work needed to be done in that regard? Absolutely, thanks Paul. I totally echo Bella's points as well but from a disabled person's organisation perspective, which is where I work for English and Scotland, there's factors even before someone gets into employment, there's various education level and we've seen the shift of universities moving to more online courses. That has advantages and disadvantages to a lot of disabled people and sometimes the education that they would have received before COVID, post COVID, is not at the same level, it's not very accessible. That's also impacting the chances to move on to employment. We've got employment support organisations in general, things to do with First Act Scotland. Some of those organisations may not be as informed around supporting disabled people specifically so there has been a change of some employment, impairment specific employment support organisations that were maybe linked with disabled organisations getting lack of funding. It's moved to more general organisations which do a lot of good work but sometimes when it comes to adjustments and understanding about barriers that disabled people face, they're not as well informed on that side of things. Then we've got recruitment side as well, so things to do with applications, role descriptions, lack of flexibility, no kind of indications of adjustments when employers are putting jobs on vacancies on site so no sort of links to a contact in HR they can request reasonable adjustments for or they're open to more disabled people applying for their jobs. In relation to what Bella was saying at her final point, I would say that we need to move away from looking at disabled people specifically and focus on employers and try to create the learning and the support with employers. We've coined it as employer ability rather than employability, so employability is to enable people making themselves more employable. One we shift that and look at employers and making themselves more accessible, more supportive, more aware of adjustments and so more disabled people are likely to be attracted to those roles because of the way that the dialogue is changing, the culture is changing and I think that's really going to help make a change to disability employment gap and that's a lot of the work that I do at the moment is focused on employers themselves. No one may thanks for that, and just to back up that point, I mean I think around about six months ago I co-hosted an event with the DWP where we invited employers and there was over 50 employers from East London came along to that event and it was around about what they can do rather than, as you said, the other way about and I think that's incredibly important. I suppose from your own point of view on the work that you do, do we know enough, I mean obviously that you mentioned about obviously the number of people with disabilities getting back into work, do we understand enough the disabilities, if the disabilities obviously is different, do we understand or do we have enough information on people with disabilities in each area around about what more needs to be done? Because, as I said, each disability will be different, each workplace will be different, do we need to look at that a little bit more in detail or what are your thoughts about that? So, I would say we really need to value lived experience. So, that is the experience that disabled people face, unique to their own situation and try and move away from generalisations because you can get into real muddy water when you try to think about stereotypes within your impairments because I've worked in this field for a long time and I learned something new every day. People's experiences are very unique and actually if employers are aware of who is working with them, their barriers, their impairment types, things that they can learn so much more from their own staff and if they're not tapping into their own staff experiences, they may need to look at that a bit more because that is really truly how you're going to understand the true impact of your policies and your procedures and how maybe you can tweak things. That's where you're going to get the most impact. I agree with Naomi on the lived experience but it's also employers who need support. I completely agree that it's employers who need to change but they do need support. I think that things like access to work could be better. It's brilliant. It's a little known scheme where there's government help or adjustments. Most adjustments don't cost very much at all so a lot of that is ranked down to attitudes. On that point that Naomi was making about education, that transition between education to employment could be so much better. The disabled students allowance and access to work, they don't talk to each other. Any adjustments that a student has in university and college. There was an example that I heard about recently. There was a young woman who was deaf. She was at university and she had her adjustments. She had everything that she needed for university. She got a placement as part of her course with an employer. The DSA adjustments that she had vanished. She had to apply to access to work adjustments. She couldn't get them for the entire time that she was there, which was a year. Part of that was that for six months access to work hadn't logged that she was deaf and they were trying to call her. Six months later they were registered that she wasn't going to answer the phone and the process started. The adjustments were in place at the end of her one year placement and she went back to university. It's that sort of joined up thinking that we really need the same rhythm in schools. I mean I heard another story of a mother who was saying that actually homeschooling at the kitchen table was a godsend because her child had a sight loss, had a visual impairment and they could try out all the different platforms to find out which one worked best for him at the kitchen table which the school wasn't able to do. Can we join up a bit and help employers out as well because it's not just sometimes that they don't want to do the right thing. They need a bit of support, a bit of help, what works, what are the barriers and what are the technologies, what are the adjustments that will overcome them and not every disabled person knows. They've not been in work before perhaps they don't know what's available and possible to join up a bit. Bella, thank you for that. I'm going to try to open that up. There's a couple of comments and a question we have here. The first comment is from Chloe and it's an agreement on the point that you made Bella around about disabilities treating us out of sight, out of mind when employers win their homework. We've got a comment from Brian Scott and Brian just touches on the point that you mentioned. We also need to understand the barriers faced by those categorised as economically inactive. Who could work and would also want to work but require support, for example, around childcare, accessible transport and so on. There's a lack of data on this group. I might be asking the question on that. We have a question from Andrew and Andrew is asking and I'll open this up to everyone and then open it up in a much broader basis. Andrew is asking, can we have the same employer index of stone while established for LGBTI rights? I don't know if anybody wants to answer that specific question we have from Andrew. I'm going to try to open it up around that. Probably culture shifts in society, not just in workplaces, but I don't know if anybody wants to tackle the point that Andrew's made about the same employer index of stone while. Does anybody want to come in on that one? Bella? Disability standard for a while, which we've shifted to a disability audit. The standard, which is like this index of who's the best, sometimes can be counterproductive on that. We moved away more to a disability audit, where organisations can self-audit, but they can also go in for an audit where we will look at the evidence that they put forward on 10 areas across the entire business, not just recruitment or employment across the whole business, because that's what's really important to make it a truly accessible experience for disabled people. To see where they can improve, I think that the index sometimes can, I don't know if other people might disagree, but it can actually backfire slightly. Anybody want to get the phone? Fella, I don't know if you want to start again, we just missed the start of your comment. I think that this is an incredibly important discussion, and I want to refer back to something that Bella made earlier on. I wasn't meaning to be too blunt in saying that transportation was... There are a whole number of other issues here that are great significance. One of the problems is that when moving to working from home, for example, many of the performance management targets, the disciplines that would apply in a workforce, are then apply at home. That disadvantages, and I would say, discriminates against disabled people of many different types. There's one organisation, and I probably should not mention this organisation, that has 17 departments, and they have run a performance management system. Of the 17 departments, in 13 of them, disabled workers were less likely to have the top level. In all cases, they were more likely to have must improve against their performance rankings and ratings. What that indicates is that individual disabilities are not being taken into consideration. There's the normalisation of people and squeezed into the box of what a typical high-performing employee should be that discriminates. How can we deal with it? Perhaps that relates something down to the index, but all performance management scores across all organisations, I think, should be transparent, accessible and will be the first detection point for some of the discriminations that take place in the workplace. One other point, I was at a conference last week where I spoke on neurodivergent people in neuro, and this is a whole massive area that I'm sure Bella and Naomi answer, but I'll know about. One seventh of the UK working population is neurodivergent. Unemployment levels among neurodivergent people are about 80 per cent. We've got a major structural problem here, so the question of employability that has been raised is crucial, and so too must be challenging the discriminations and the barriers that exist in these ways. There is absolutely no room for complacency here given that the labour market has shrunk as a consequence of Covid. I'm going to open it up and see if anybody else wants to come in, but there's a couple of comments that I think are very relevant. We have a comment from Mark McMillan saying, agree that access to work could be better. It brings in support for disabled people to carry out their work duties, but they don't cover voluntary work, only paid work. This leaves disabled people at a considerable disadvantage as voluntary work is genuinely recognised as a billet made to boost people's CV. Mark McMillan, a deaf BSL user, won't be able to apply for access to work funding to be on a BSL interpreter to do voluntary work. What should we think we've done about this? I'm then going to talk about another issue. Kirsty Henderson is making the same point. She says that access to work takes months to get permissions done, waiting 12 weeks plus at present. A big impact on people starting work in this place of being offered a job in no change in the decade is still only one in four blind, partially sighted people in work. IRI and IV visibly a better employer also supports employers. We're talking, obviously, some day with deaf BSL user and some day I would assume Kirsty with issues around their sight and so on. I think just what you've said there, Phil, has been backed up by two people who are trying to get access to work. It doesn't cover voluntary work and it doesn't cover, obviously, invisibly impaired people. Naomi Bella, I don't know, based on where you are in South Wales, feel free to come in, but Naomi, probably yourself, then Bella, are you picking up these issues in the work that you deal with? Absolutely. Absolutely, Paul. It's a huge frustration on disabled people's organisations and part of a feedback group, stakeholder group, with other disabled people's organisations to directly feedback to access to work. The major barriers that still people are facing, delays in application processing, sort of loopholes in their structure where if you seem to apply before you've started your job, you get put to the top of the processing list. But there are no point, does it say that, in the guidance online, so people aren't aware of that? So they're only aware of that if, say, they're working with myself or another person who does can't have this information. There's ways of getting round certain issues with applications if they're asking for a personal contribution, for instance. And it gets very complicated because there's all these sort of secrets with access to work. It's often not used by a lot of employers because they don't know about it. And then when they do find out about it, they're either completely put off because of the delays, the issues, then the staff member getting exceptionally stressed out because they're trying to get the adjustments that they need. The employer obviously doesn't know really what to do and how to support. And you've got this awful situation going on with so many disabled people in work, but it really does have to be tackled. And I think it's one of the most, you've kind of got over the hurdle of getting a job, which is enormous. There's enormous barriers for a lot of disabled people. And then when you've got the job, you're then often completely hit with a ridiculous level of bureaucratic process. And that often means some disabled people aren't even able to take on the job. So, you know, it's really unacceptable, but I appreciate it. I just have also said they've received an enormous, a big rise in applications in the last six months because of the move to returning back to the office and people's change in circumstances. Long COVID has also increased applications, so people's impairment type is changing. So, they've had to do a big recruitment drive and get more people in. So, they're obviously dealing with a lack of staff as well. But I do find a lot of things are getting blamed on COVID. And it's kind of like, well, how much longer can we keep that going when really just we just need to see results, but to see all the people in work? I mean, thank you for that. Bella, and then I'm going to bring on South Cal for your views on that as well. But Bella, are you picking up the same issues? Definitely picking up the same issues as Naomi. And I would say a few things that would really help. I mean, I know access to work like everybody else has got some staff shortages in there, but one, train access to work advisers because one employer who's a disability confident employer called them up and asked about access to work. And the job centre adviser didn't know what access to work was and also didn't know what disability confident was. So, training and joining up on that. And advertise access to work better. A lot of employers, as Naomi says, don't know that it exists. A lot of disabled people don't know that it exists. And streamlining, maybe a little bit of investment just in streamlining those processes. But a lot of our member employers, and I said the large corporates on the whole, they bypass access to work now. They don't bother going down that route. They just pay for the adjustments and make the assessments themselves. And they use their own resources because partly because they say, well, maybe they should leave the funding as well for smaller employers. But it would be nice if the smaller employers could actually access it. I want to ask you a specific question. It's obviously your experiences across the both public, private and voluntary sectors. Do you find, if we talk about access to work, do you find there are differences in how, I suppose, efficient these areas are, whether it's private, public or voluntary? Is there a difference in the sectors about how they look at access to work, how they talk about disability-confident workplaces? Do you find there's a difference in that way? Is there one sector better than another? Is there a license to be learnt from one area from another? I'd say there are. They're quite different, I guess. I haven't worked across all three, as you say. Naturally, the voluntary sector is well placed to help educate many of us on how we can open up voluntary roles more broadly. I think that one of the things that it feels like we need to do better is have a more holistic view and an understanding of who's offering what services. Take a more joined-up approach. As a serial volunteer myself, alongside my kind of day job, one of the things I'm very passionate about is the fact that volunteering roles help us build skill sets. In some cases, we can't traditionally typically build in our day-to-day jobs. I think that it's a tremendous way to help people learn other skills and help them transition into other sectors and other occupations. I'd like to see that improve. The charity sector is a big part of supporting us. The funding sits in the private sector, the private sector and the public sector need to be talking more and trying to figure out how to make sure that the private sector is supportive and providing investment where that's possible and practical. I think that a lot of the legislation or understanding of how the stuff works in whatever frameworks we have is typically sitting within the public sector. I think that Bella needed to come in earlier and I can agree with that. I just feel like it's not just this, it's a lot of things. We're never just joined up enough. Different bodies don't know who's doing what. In some cases, there's duplication and we're not making enough impact. How do we change that? It's going to be my perspective listening to my fellow panellists. Just on that, I'm going to say to our audience that we've got around about 20 minutes of questions left. In the last five minutes, I'm going to ask each of our panellists and give them a notice just to say, give one minute around about the most important things that have come out today. If anybody wants to put comments or questions in, please feel free to do that in the chat. I'm going to try and move on to... We talked about shifts in attitude. We're talking about shifts of attitude with an employer and so on. Is there a broader understanding of a close in the public awareness of a diverse workforce? Is there that understanding about how that can be contributed to not just workforce but obviously to the wider society? I'm going to open that up to that one, whether there's been a change in perception or a change in views of the wider population in that regard. I don't know who wants to come in, I'll bring in that one. Are we moving in the right direction in terms of how the public sees this issue? I think it's a really mixed bag out there. I think what Bella particularly related to before is extremely important and that is any sense and understanding of the importance of disability has to come from the disabled people themselves, the self definitions, the articulation of their experience, an organisation speaking adjustments and they should be making adjustments. Apart from anything else, we have the Equality Act, with all its clauses. We have a raft of health and safety legislation and regulations that would appear that the two contenders for the Conservative leadership race wish to scrap, burn up in a bonfire of controls. Let's make no mistake, the consequences of the removal of protections on workers proposed by the Conservative party leaders is extremely serious for all workers, but particularly for disabled workers as well. I think that those questions are becoming more acute in the public domain. I think that the legitimacy of people's genuine experiences of disability has to come to the fore in that. In broader society, there is a wider recognition of that, but it runs up into many of the obstacles. I repeat that it's not merely a case of one disability, we have to remember the intersectional disability that people suffer as well. This is understood, but I don't want to use the word suffer, experience rather. For example, you have a woman who's older, who's perhaps autistic, would run into multiple cases of multiple instances of pressures of vectors of potential discrimination and exclusion here. This is really something, I think. I think that there's a general sense that this is broader, yes, in society, but it has to be taken on. I repeat my point, which I think is really concrete and important at the moment. Two million people in Britain have long Covid, right? One-fifth of those will be incapacitated from working as they did because of long Covid. An employment tribunal case in Scotland in June, you may or may not be aware of this, is an extremely important one, determined that long Covid was a disability under the Disability Discrimination Act. I'm thinking in all terms of the Equality Act. It's instances like that that really prompt us to make sure that we grow wider and encourage greater public awareness. Before I bring in Naomi, there's a comment that's come in from Sally. It would be good for workplaces to become more accessible and inclusive by design. It's often that the challenges cannot be fixed by access to work alone because there are issues that are systemic. I think that we're talking about design and workplaces. It's very important. Needs is a member of disabled people who have a right to dignity. They should not always be forced into positions where they repeatedly and strangely have to disclose their needs before simple adjustments are made. I'm going to bring this up in terms of that. I'll ask you to come back in, Phil. If anybody knows this, Andrew has asked in many cases from individuals who have been able to raise a case in the Court of Session to uphold the Equality Act that cannot get legal aid, i.e. the missing middle. I'll ask you to come back in a second, Phil, on that one. But Naomi, just on the point that we talked about, I suppose, changes in society generally and obviously the work that you do will be speaking to a broad range of people. There's a couple of points, really. It's really positive that disability access barriers are getting discussed more and more, especially in the media. You're seeing news reports about lots of different people's experiences of whether it's to do with addressing services, employment, quite a number of different things. But we do have to be careful of the narrative. So often, narrative around disabled people is surrounded with pity and inspiration in line with the social model of disability. And disabled people are disabled by barriers presented in society through a variety of different situations. But sometimes media portrayal is just continuing people's thoughts around, oh, I must help this disabled person because it's the right thing to do. Oh, I must feel sorry. Oh, gosh, aren't they such an inspiration? But actually, that's totally misleading people's, disabled people's rights and abilities to work because it's shifting perspective. So that's something to just be really aware of when you're looking at news reports. Where's the narrative coming from here? And in relation to what Phil was saying about long COVID, that's also been accepted by access to work as well. So if someone is experiencing long COVID, then they will be able to access support from access to work and they changed that earlier on this year. Bella, I'm going to bring yourself in and then sathpal after that. Bella, just on the point that has been made about the general cultural shift in society, and obviously just to comment on the point that Andrew made as well around about the cases in the court session, you've kind of got legal aid. I think that's incredibly important enough. Have you any knowledge of that in terms of a few number of cases on issues that you've been picking up? Bella, just on the cultural shift but also on the point that Andrew made? On the cultural shift, I think there is some awareness amongst some employers now of the benefits of employing disabled people and it is a business case. I know of one bank that is actively poaching from disabled neurodivergent people from other banks in their IT systems because they want people who have been trained up and are working well in this. So there is some awareness around that. I think there was a report pre-pandemic 2018 by Accenture in the United States, which showed the disability inclusion advantage where it said that companies that had increased their inclusion of disabled people were outperforming their peers for shareholder returns by four times. That was done by Accenture, so that was quite interesting. It was pre-pandemic, so there is some awareness around the benefits. People have already talked about problem-solving. There is an opportunity now where things are possible to be so flexible and to be so inclusive. This inclusion by design, we got so many calls during the pandemic about platforms like this one, like Zoom, like Teams. How can we make them most accessible? How can we make sure that everybody is included? Which ones have the greatest number of accessibility features? Companies like Microsoft were falling over themselves to try and prove that theirs was the most accessible. There is a cultural shift and there is an opportunity now, now more than ever before, and I think that that might be the one to talk about that. Technology does help and helps to shift attitudes. On Andrew's specific point, of course, it's a legal aid. It's gone down and down over the years. It's been many, many years since I took actual cases. It was in England, but I remember taking a case to the Court of Appeal equivalent in England to the Court of Sessions. I had to beg favours, basically. I worked for law centre and I was ringing up barristers to say, it's a really, really interesting case. You'll do it for free, won't you? Because we haven't got any money. There is no funding and I don't see that changing. The things like the employment bill, what happened to it, but sort of vanished? Bella, I think that that's important. From my point of view, I'll bring Southpall on the second. I think that you led them in beautifully into this little part. I think that that's really important because the things that have come out today are things that I can take back to the Social Security Committee and Social Justice Committee and say, look, these are issues that have been raised. We need, as a committee, to look at that. So this has been really helpful. Southpall, with that beautiful lead-in, we've got from Bella, just on obviously the culture shift. What have you picked up? What's your experience? I think there's a cultural shift. I think, in a lot of the organisations I've worked with over the last five years or so, quite different sectors, different industries. It's a greater recognition that we do need to do more. That's resulting in initiatives springing up to sport. I think that one of the things I see now, I do puzzle over, is we have all these diversity, quality, inclusion initiatives. I think that, sadly, that's my personal experience, is often I see that I've focused a lot on the gender balance piece or greater inclusion of ethnicities. Again, it's obvious that these are all important, and certainly in my industry, we have a huge, still the huge, gender imbalance for engineers, and a lot of the initiatives that I'm involved in. However, I don't hear enough of a conversation around some of the stuff that we've covered today around greater inclusion of those with disability. I was pleased to hear Phil talking about neurodiversity, because I'm active in the British Computer Society, who are the UK industry body for IT. I've been with them my entire career. I'm now a chartered fellow and I'm the chair of one of the specialist groups, and only very recently we've introduced a neurodiversity specialist group. I think that these things are starting to happen. We are seeing the shifts, but it feels quite slow, and I think that there needs to be greater emphasis and more investment, as I said earlier. I think that the big thing is education. I think that a lot of us need greater education, and I do know a lot of colleagues and a lot of the collaborations that I'm involved in, broadly and globally in some cases. People do want education. Where is the education? How can we then use that to create the kind of environments and cultures in organisations, in society and in enterprises that we need to have to truly be inclusive? We've led us beautifully into the next set of questions. We've got about eight, nine or ten minutes left in question. I want to ask, and this is crossed to all the panel, and I'll probably start with Phil for this one. We've talked about what the issues are and what the barriers are. I suppose that the question that I'm going to ask is what legal and structural changes need to be to support more people, disabled people, into employment in terms of that, and what should we be doing more in Scotland in terms of that regard? We've often heard of the issues around immigration and the need of more skilled workers. We've obviously mentioned Brexit before. We've lost a lot of people to our workforce bill. We've mentioned the issue around Covid and so on. What needs to be done? What needs to be changed in Scotland? What message would you send to MSPs? What message would you send to my committee, for example, of what needs to be done? I'm going to ask everybody to keep that to about a minute and a half possible. Then we'll lead on to the last minute where I'm going to ask you to watch your most important things you've taken out today and watch your key messages. What needs to be changed? Phil, I'll start with you. Then go to Niome and then Sathpal Llynbella. First of all, I would say that some of the legislation exists. The problem is that it's not being implemented, or it's not being, or employers are not implementing it, or it's not taken seriously. Some of the work that I did in terms of the whole working from home experience, when display screen equipment regulations are not being used, effectively, is going to disadvantage and discriminate against disabled people. There's a requirement on organisations to do this. We have the health and safety work debt of 1974, which carries with it a duty of care for employees. Its implementation means that it now has to cover the home as a workplace. Are the risk assessments being carried out? Are employers following this through? I think that a key leaver in much of this, and I'm involved actively in the hazards network and various other networks, is extremely important that workers have a voice. Work is voice through trade unions, particularly through trade unions, who are incredibly proactive. Increasingly proactive in this area is extremely important. I'm not going to come up with a prescriptive timetable here, but one thing that is absolutely true is that existing legislation, in many cases, provides the facility for this to happen. The question, often, is agency, will and ability to challenge discriminatory barriers that exist, and indeed to take action, and indeed to name and shame. Final point, if people are interested, please get in touch with me and I'll send them some of my work. This major UK organisation, which has significant employment in Scotland, can be seen through its performance management ratings and rankings to be discriminated against. Asian older people, disabled people, black ethnic minority people, it's as stark as you like, and these things need to be brought out from under the stones, covered in light and dealt with. Felly, please send me that. Just to back up the point that you made, Alexandria has mentioned about the Scottish national strategy, not as it appears to have been ignored. How can we reinstate and reinforce it in a mandatory requirement in the workforce to improve services to autistic people? Alexandria, I've been speaking to a group of people in New Saladin who are having that same issue in terms of not just the workplace but access to childcare and so on, so that's an important issue. Now I'm going to bring to yourself, then Sathpal, then Bella. We'll look to finish if you can keep this to a minute, this part, and then we'll ask you for your closing statements within a minute as well. I think we really need to involve disabled people more, disabled people's organisations, so that's really leading on the lived experience of disabled people. We're led by and for disabled people, so we really do know what the barriers are and what challenges are, and we can support with the education. Like Sathpal was saying before, there's not a lot of kind of, you're seeing kind of stuff about gender balance and certain sort of ethnicity policies and things, but when it comes to disability, it can be really uncomfortable for people to discuss it because they're so scared of getting it wrong. Now that's something I get all the time, every day with employers, they don't know how to tackle a topic, they don't know how to discuss it, they don't want to offend anybody so they don't talk about it. What I would say is actually kind of acknowledge your fear and maybe then you can try and challenge it and learn more, rather than just not have a conversation because we're not actually going to move any further forward, but by working with disabled people's organisations, learning from the lived experience, you're going to gradually get more and more comfortable about that topic. And I'll leave it at that, so you can go to the next term. We're still got our minute closing, so I'll come back to that. Sathpal, in relation to the issue in the book, what do we need to do in Scotland in terms of— I record my sentiment, because I felt the same way for years. I think we have to really focus in on inclusivity to get diversity, you can't have one without the other. In my industry, certainly, a lot of what I do, you can't build great digital product without really understanding who you're serving, and if you're building something that's serving a broader demographic, you've got to understand the demographic and the best way to do that is to build diverse teams, otherwise you simply can't achieve that. And I still think we're falling short significantly in that way. If we're going to be truly inclusive—and to me everyone means everyone—you build truly inclusive diverse teams, you will build world-class digital product. We're a digital world now, we've got a digital strategy. Those things are crucial, but we can't build products that serve everyone that's accessible if we don't include them in the conversation. What's to say after all that? I would say that the fear of getting it wrong is really important. I think that they're role models. Disabled people are in work, and the more successful they get, the less disabled they are. As in, they don't talk about it because they can adjust the way that they work, they've got that power to do that. I think that role models, you can't be what you can't see. Most disabilities are required, you're not born with them, and most of them over the age of 53. If you haven't got a disability yet, the good news is that there may well be one coming down the line for those of us who are over 53. Those people exist, they need to speak, they need to acknowledge that they are disabled and that they work with adjustments, they work differently and that other people can do this too, and build an inclusive design, as somebody has said in the chat about designing their workplaces, rather than just making exceptions for themselves. People places are accessible, inclusive and a lot of people don't define themselves as disabled. There's self-identification, it's just that I am what I am and I need a few things, I need things to be done differently. Will an employer be able to accommodate that and to see that? Encourage employers to talk about that, to say that we want everyone, we want different people, we've got these different networks, and really increase that visibility of disabled people at all levels. It's good work, it's not just any work, it's good work. I'm never going to come across and ask for the one key point, and I need to keep this tight to the one minute this time, so I'm going to ask Phil to come in first of all, then Sathpal in terms of the one key takeaway within the minute, and then we'll close up at 4 o'clock. I'm going to be really naughty and not refer to stuff that's been talked about today, but I'm going to finish on a point that's emerging from a survey that I've just completed, a different survey of almost 3,000 engineering workers, including many in Scotland. It's about working time, and the survey shows that there has been, because of Covid, a really profound reappraisal of attitudes to working from home, to what life balance, to where people wish to spend their time. Ninety-four per cent of people in the survey were in favour of a campaign for shorter working time, not necessarily a four-day week, but a shorter working time. I think that what Covid has shown is exposed or revealed what is most important in our lives. Work is part of it, but work as a means to a far greater work-life balance is really quite fundamental going forward. Therefore, final, final thing, yes, we live in a kind of archetypal digital age, but hey, hey, come on, it's a human period we're living through as well. It's a human world, not a digital world. Well, thanks for that. I'm sure we could have another hour on that subject alone. I'm going to go to Naomi and then Bella and then Sathpal. So, Naomi, is your final takeaway from the event? Well, I would say that, you know, let's try and move away from trying to make everything fully accessible, fully inclusive. We're not going to be able to do that because of the world we live in. But that kind of impacts the fear of getting it wrong. You know, let's try and be open and have honest conversations. Joined up approaches come up a lot. We need to have information sharing across different sectors, you know, access to the work, actually turning people, what they can and can't do a bit more about, you know, the little secrets to do with kind of getting around their application problems. And a big thing is training, you know, for employers, trying to ensure that employers know and understand way more about disability and inclusion than they have. And that, I think, being led by disabled people and social organisations is going to be really important to ensure it's actually fit for purpose. Naomi, thanks for that. Bella and then Sathpal. I think if anything, the two years has shown us the last two years is we can change, we can adapt, we can do it differently. Now is a real opportunity. Include disabled people in your workplaces, listen to disabled people and you'll build better products, better services, serve customers better because you're serving people like us, like your customers and include them in the workforce. And I think that would make the biggest change. And then talk about disability, talk about being disabled or having a long-term condition and make that normal because it is normal. Bella, thank you. Sathpal? I feel like everything's being said. I like the point that Phil made there because although a lot of my work is in digital technology, what the last couple of years have told us is the humans first. Focus on the human, focus on the connection, focus on the communication, focus on the education, let's not be ignorant, let's be open minded, let's inform one another and let's move the conversation forward as quickly and productively as we can and let's make more impact. Sathpal, that's a really important point to finish. We've talked about what a society needs to do, we've talked about its employers, what do we need to do. This is all about the individual person and how we make that. So that's a really important point that you've just finished on. I just want to say thank you for everybody that has joined us today and for making a big contribution. The comments and questions were fantastic. I want to thank our panel Bella Gore, Sathpal Singh, Professor Phil Taira and Naomi Walk for leading. I think that she was a really insightful discussion. I'd like to thank our BSL interpreters, Max Gregg and Heather Graham who supported today's event. Thank you very much. I want to take this opportunity to remind that there is another online event taking place as part of this festival and it's a climate crisis that hasn't gone away and it starts at 12 o'clock tomorrow. There are also events in the Scottish Parliament building if you're able to join us. For full information and to boot your tickets, visit festivalpolitics.scot. We've finished at 4 o'clock on the dot so I'm delighted to see that we've met that objective. I certainly would like to pick up the issues that have been raised by all everybody here and certainly something I've taken forward at the committee level. It's something I'd like to take forward with every single one of you on the panel as well as some really important issues and discussions. I really enjoyed that today. Can I thank you very much? Can I thank the Parliament organisers as well for doing what they're doing today and can I thank the audience for coming along and wish you a happy day. Thank you very much, folks.