The (In)effectiveness of voluntary regulation for regulating discrimination in the workplace: evidence from the UK Disability Confident Program

Voluntary regulatory programs are ubiquitous in contemporary society, as governments frequently lack the resources to monitor many businesses for potential market failures. Consequently, governments are happy to rely on voluntary regulatory programs that have the potential to boost business compliance with existing regulations. Much of the scholarly focus of such standards has been in the realm of environmental and labour issues, where vast supply chains fragment public authority and create the need for private standards. In this paper, we examine the efficacy of voluntary regulation in the context of anti-discrimination policy, specifically with respect to disability discrimination. We approach the question from two key starting points: first, anti-discrimination law has a mixed record in reducing discrimination partly due to large organisations’ abilities to “manage” discrimination claims, while maintaining business as usual and second, voluntary programs that do not actually require anything of their members tend to be associated with greenwashing and free-riding. We use 38 semi-structured interviews as well as document evidence to assess the effectiveness of the “Disability Confidence” Programme, a voluntary programme, created by the UK government to reduce disability discrimination in the workplace. Our evidence reveals that members of the programme tend to go after low-hanging fruit of less costly, observable actions, without doing the harder work of reforming culture and attitudes around disability in the workplace.