Disability equality plan

4. Leadership and accountability

We are clear that for disabled people to have confidence in our commitment to this plan, a transparent and robust governance framework is essential.

4.1 Reporting on progress

We remain committed to principles of transparency and public accountability. To support this, we will report on progress through:

a) The UN Committee for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for the periodic examination of the UK.

b) A progress report on the Disability Equality Plan to be published in 2026.

c) The 2027 Mainstreaming Equality Report due to be published by April 2027.

We will also establish new governance structures to both steer the implementation of our Disability Equality Plan and hold us to account for its delivery. We will continue to work closely with disabled people and DPOs to develop the detail of our approach to measuring progress, including the design and delivery of the governance structures.

A monitoring and evaluation framework will set out the key indicators that will be used to measure progress. We will work with analytical services and DPOs to improve the quality of available data so we can measure the impact of our actions. The governance structures will remain in place to support development and delivery of the next phase of the plan.

Actions

9. We will ensure disabled people can hold us to account on progress by:

• Establishing a Disability Equality Delivery group to oversee progress on the actions identified in this plan. This group will report on progress to Ministers and hold regular discussions with disabled people and the organisations that support them through a Disability Equality Collaborative providing direct dialogue between disabled people and Government.
• Holding an annual Cabinet takeover by disabled people to improve disability equality competence and leadership. This will also provide additional accountability at Ministerial level.
• Asking disabled people in mid-2026/early 2027 to gather evidence of the impact of our actions.
• Publishing a progress report to determine where we need to focus our efforts in the 2026-2031 parliamentary session.

10. We will improve our approach to evidence-based policy making and align with the Equality Evidence Strategy 2023-2025 so we can measure improvements in disabled people’s lives. We will gather and publish new, robust, quantitative and qualitative evidence, that is both disability-specific and intersectional. To do this we will:

• Engage with DPOs to identify and agree priorities for filling evidence gaps.
• Work with DPOs to co-design research to fill priority gaps, working within available budget and other resource constraints.