Update on Access to Work Research
Tom gives an update on their Access to Work Research.
You can read this as a document here.
What is Access to Work?
Over the last year, we have increasingly heard of people in the arts struggling with Access to Work, which is the government programme designed to subsidise access requirements for disabled people in the workplace. The idea of the programme is quite progressive; it removes the cost of access from both the employee and the employer, and most evidence gathered about it shows that it is effective in helping disabled people to work.
Some stats to set the scene in the arts:
The latest estimates from the Department for Work and Pensions’ Family Resources Survey indicate that 16.1 million people in the UK had a disability in the 2022/23 financial year. This represents 24% of the total population.
We also know this is roughly replicated in the workforce as 23% of working age adults are disabled.
It is estimated that about 14.7% of the creative industries workforce are disabled, this includes both the subsidised and more commercial areas of the creative industries.
However, if we take a more focused look at the cultural sector and, for example, organisations that receive investment from ACE, this falls to about 9% of the workforce.
If we then look at leadership in this area, we can see that less than 2% of NPO investment by value is given to disabled-led organisations. It is also important to note here that the metric ACE use to define a disabled-led organisation is much more relaxed that the more common “DDPO” (Deaf / Disabled People’s Organisation) that is often used in wider society.
What we see here is that the Creative Industries are not sufficiently representative of the country, but also that we are falling behind other sectors in terms of supporting disabled people to work. This seems to get worse as we narrow down on more subsidised organisations, and is critically low in terms of disabled people leading our natural culture.
What have I been doing?
I’ve been interviewing artists and arts workers about their Access to Work agreements and experiences and building case studies. I’ve also been researching the way organisations are managing Access to Work, particularly the financial methods they are using. I’ve been doing this to really try and define the problem we are looking at here, so we can more effectively try and explore solutions. There are other people who have been doing this work longer than me, and there are also organisations with much more resources doing this outside of the arts sector as well.
I’ve been doing this in my “free time” which is not exactly plentiful right now, which means the sample size isn’t large enough to publish formally. But, I do want to share the findings so far as they are emerging and we begin to explore solutions to this problem. I have anonymised all case studies for now, because until I stop collecting them and identify some more formal trends, I don’t want to specify individuals.
What have I found?
As I have collected case studies, what we have seen has broadly fallen into four groups.
Out of Scope - In the first group we are seeing people with (usually) long-standing agreements with Access to Work who are being told that certain elements are out of scope. There is possibly a trend here that this is focused on disabled arts leaders, though I couldn’t say that confidently yet. This also tends to be focused on elements like travel, where Access to Work has argued that not all travel is necessary to someone’s role. From other research I have seen in other sectors, this doesn’t seem to be specific to the arts, there does seem to be at least an informal tightening of the scope of agreements.
General reductions / removal - In this group we are seeing a number of people who are seeing a blanket reduction or removal in their support, without a precise explanation about things being out of scope for their role. This is often not explained well, and has to progress to the point of an appeal to be reinstated. Again, this doesn’t seem to be unique to the arts sector, there does seem to be a more widespread trend of unexplained reductions or removals of support.
Freelance artists - There is a large group of freelance artists who are struggling to properly interact with Access to Work. We know that freelance artists often exist in something more like a gig economy, where there is a huge supply, and not enough demand which has driven down pay and consistency of work. This means a lot of freelance artists are reliant on grants and commissions to make work, but also (as I have written about before) self-employed people are not eligible for many grants. This reliance on subsidy for income, and inconsistency of income, means they are often falling below the threshold of income for a period of time that Access to Work requires. When they fall below this threshold, they lose their support. Access to Work doesn’t have to have a good understanding of the economic model (or lack thereof) of freelance artists, and their eligibility criteria is often incompatible with how that labour happens. This does seem to be quite focused in the arts, because of the continuing collapse of the freelance artists working environment.
Delays - There is another very large group of people experiencing different types of delays with Access to Work. Delays of up to 9 months from application to confirmation of support are increasingly common, and this means that organisations are having to pay for the support until it is confirmed. This means if an organisation hires a new disabled person, they might have to cash flow access measures for up to 9 months before they can reclaim that. This might seem reasonable outside of the sector, but cash flow is not exactly strong in the arts right now; there’s a growing number of organisations that are not confident of their cash flow for that length of time. In organisations which have a lot of disabled team members, we are also seeing formal reserves being operated in order to increase cash flow; this eats up important resources that could be used for growth, innovation, and creating new jobs.
What does this mean?
I have so far not focused a lot on the first two groups, there’s a wider body of people exploring these more general trends across multiple sectors.
The third group, freelance artists, is really complicated. There is a possible short-term solution to suggest a change to the eligibility for freelance artists, but this exceptionalism is hard to define because we don’t have any good data on what kind of threshold would work. There is a chronic under-exploration of the actual economics of the freelance artist workforce. I also think any solution here needs to connect to the wider crisis affecting all freelance artists as well, and so I think more work is needed in this area before we have effective solutions.
However, the fourth group does have some solutions. At the heart of the problem here is a delay in confirming support, this is a cash flow problem and we have a good sense that there is an acute problem with cash flow in the arts. The situation we want to avoid here is organisations becoming increasingly reluctant to employ disabled people because they can’t afford to cash flow access measures. This is not going to improve those statistics I shared earlier about the failure of the arts to properly employ disabled people.
What is my suggestion?
What is really needed here is resources to properly understand the factors, including economics, which means that the creative industries and the cultural sector, more specifically, are not employing disabled people and supporting us to progress into leadership. This is not an entirely new concept; for example, in Australia, there is a national arts and disability strategy, which brings together the different mechanisms to improve this, amongst other things.
But, in the meantime, we need a short-term solution while we do this work. What I’ve proposed so far is that we can relieve a lot of this pressure if we move the cash flow issue out of arts organisations in order to free up their capacity for growth and innovation. As the problem is relatively acute because of the cash flow challenges we are seeing in the arts, it feels appropriate that ACE might manage this mechanism.
If someone starts a job, ACE would provide the funding for those measures and then, when support is confirmed, ACE are paid back under the agreement. ACE would need costs to run the programme and may expend some money as they would be shouldering a small amount of risk in case a claim is unsuccessful.
What now?
Come and discuss these ideas with me, or amplify this information and advocate to decision-makers, reminding them that if the government want to pursue growth in the creative industries, that this shouldn’t exclude disabled people.
I am also continuing the research. If you would like to be a case study, please drop me an email, and we can plan the best way to do that.
I am also building partners to explore the long-term solution here, which might look more like a disability arts strategy to identify mechanisms we can use to properly manage the situation in the long term. If you think you might want to support this work or develop a partnership, please get in touch.