We are committed to improving the lives of disabled
people and will soon publish the National Disability
Strategy. It will focus on the issues that disabled
people say affect them the most in all aspects of
life. The strategy will take into account the impacts
of the pandemic and include commitments which tackle
barriers and increase opportunities.
We welcome this conference’s focus on COVID-19
response and recovery. The UK Government is fully
committed to supporting disabled people. We regularly
engage with disabled people to ensure their needs are
considered in the Government’s COVID-19 response. We
are ensuring that disabled people continue to have
access to financial and other support, and accessible
communications.
Furthermore, we are actively working on policies to
prevent health-related job losses and are already
helping disabled people stay in, and enter work. In
response to the pandemic, we have provided specialist
employment support remotely, and made programmes
easier to access.
We will publish a Health and Disability Green Paper
informed by the views of disabled people. This will
explore how our welfare system can better meet the
needs by: improving claimant experience of our
services, enabling independent living and improving
employment outcomes.
The UK remains committed to global disability rights
and inclusion. The UK’s Integrated Review, setting
our international priorities, reaffirms our work to
protect human rights for all throughout our diplomacy
and development activities. The second Global
Disability Summit monitoring report demonstrates
excellent progress against the 170 sets of global
disability commitments, including by the UK.
In 2021, the UK will launch an enhanced Disability
Inclusion Strategy, expanding to include new pressing
global issues, such as responses to COVID-19 and
climate change. It will reflect our wider global
footprint allowing us to work with more partners
across the world. To support implementation, we will:
create a new External Disability Board, deliver new
commitments at the 2022 Global Disability Summit and
work across UK government to embed disability
inclusion considerations across our entire Official
Development Assistance spend.
