The Disability Discrimination Act and SMEs: the future of the threshold

This paper addresses the issues raised for very small businesses by the introduction in the UK of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). It considers the “20‐employee threshold” which exempts organisations with fewer than 20 employees from the Act’s anti‐discrimination provisions. The attitudes and practices of small employers towards people with disabilities are explored to determine whether these differ significantly between the exempt group and larger, non‐exempt, SMEs. It is suggested that lowering the threshold is unlikely to cause significant difficulty for very small firms, but that it will not, on its own, have a dramatic impact on the spread of good practice among small firms in general.