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Sussex Business Guide to Disability

As the project has ended, its services to businesses are no longer available. However, DEB produced the Sussex Business Guide to Disability, which businesses may find useful. This Guide is free and is at http://www.disabilityguide.info/

DEB also encouraged public sector organisations to extend their influence on local businesses, to encourage them to include disabled people in their workforces and in their service provision.

DEB researched and reviewed best practice in terms of procurement and equality, and created a set of recommendations for procurement staff to follow.

The recommendations include the need for procurement departments to:

• Be transparent in specifying the equalities requirements in the invitation to tender so that companies know exactly what is expected of them.
• Offer feedback and assistance to companies that struggle to meet these requirements.
• Monitor the performance of the successful contractors in terms of equality.
• We encouraged public authorities to support local businesses to attain equalities standards, rather than simply exclude those that don't. By working in this way, public authorities can build a healthy dialogue with their local business community with the aim of ensuring a lasting change in favour of diversity.

We worked in partnership with key public bodies. This entailed us walking through a contract where, together we looked at the implications of applying these recommendations at each stage. In doing so we could identify the right kind of support, training and development needed to facilitate best practice.