Amendment to disability law

set to impact upon 1.3 million small to medium sized businesses in the UK

According to leading disability insurer, UnumProvident, changes to the Disability Discrimination Act will impact upon more than 1.3 million SMEs in the UK all of whom will be required by law from October 2004 to make their workplace accessible to both disabled employees and customers.

Although the Act became law in 1995, recent amendments mean that from October next year businesses will be required to make reasonable adjustments in relation to the physical features of their premises to make them more accessible for disabled people.

Nationally, the amendment will affect more than one million small businesses and impact positively on the 600,000 disabled people who currently work for these businesses.
Joanne Hindle, Corporate Services Director for UnumProvident said: As of October next year when the law comes into force, small businesses which don''t comply could face law suits from customers or industrial tribunals from staff.

However, there is no need to panic. The key principle of the Act is reasonableness and employers have more than a year to respond to the changes. With foresight, many changes can be incorporated into routine maintenance or refurbishment between now and October 2004.
The necessary level of reasonable adjustment can be divided into seven key areas:

1. Approaching the premises: improvements to lighting, parking facilities, the surfaces of paths and other routes, and removing any obstructions on them.
2. Entering the premises: installing ramps and handrails, marking steps clearly and improving lighting, installing call bells and entry phones, relocating or altering the main entrance to facilitate easier access, such as by repositioning the door handle and making the door easier to open, and securing floor mats.
3. Inside the premises: making signs easier to read by making them simply worded and using well contrasted colours and symbols, putting safety markings on glazed doors, and improving lighting, making circulation easier, particularly by removing obstructions on the floor, fitting handrails, clearly marking steps and making surfaces level.
4. Communication with staff: improving lighting, separating quiet and noisy areas.
5. Getting to goods and services: changing the heights of shelves, making product information easier to read, ensuring staff are on hand to assist, provision of additional seating.
6. Customer toilets: fitting grabrails, better lighting, use of colour rather than all-white areas, using less slippery floor surfaces, having outward opening doors, clear signs for toilets, maintaining the alarms in the toilets which should be possible to activate from floor level.
7. Leaving the premises: testing emergency evacuation procedures and keeping routes free from obstruction.
Small business owners may benefit from two guides which have been published by the Employers'' Forum on Disability and UnumProvident. The first, The Knowledge - Disability Solutions for Employers is a ''best practice'' reference kit which concentrates on providing employers with the benefits of, and tools needed for, an inclusive approach to disabled employees. The second, Solutions at Work, is a one-stop reference guide which answers a range of employers'' questions on disability.
Both guides can be purchased from the Employers'' Forum on Disability on 0207 403 3020.
1 Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), Statistics for the United Kingdom, September 2000; 1-49 employees

About UnumProvident
UnumProvident is the UK''s leading provider of group income protection insurance, with over 30 years of experience and over 42%* of the market. Our critical illness and life insurance products enable our customers to purchase complementary protection solutions that together make a comprehensive protection package.
Our income protection customers benefit from our expertise in the specialist areas of disability, rehabilitation and return-to-work. We enable individuals to protect their incomes, ensuring their financial security if they are unable to work because of illness or injury. For employers, we safeguard one of their most valuable resources by helping employees return to work following long-term absence.
At the end of 2002, UnumProvident protected over 905,000 lives through more than 10,600 schemes. During 2002 we paid benefits of over 133 million - of which more than 105 million were in income protection.
Our US parent company, UnumProvident Corporation, traces its history back to 1848 and is today the market leader of group and individual income protection insurance in the United States. Premium income for UnumProvident Corporation and its subsidiaries exceeded $7.4 billion in the year ended 31 December 2002. Total assets were $45.3 billion at 31 December 2002.