Equality Act - Disability Discrimination: Creating an Action Plan

Once you have completed your Access Audit, the next step is to create an Action Plan setting out how you intend to tackle the issues that have been identified. In deciding what is "practical and reasonable" a company should consider such issues as corporate profile, customer base, budget, type, together with additional areas such as age of the building, term of residency, and level of existing compliance.

Included within the Disability Access Audit Forms subfolder of the Health & Safety Document Folder is an action plan template (see below).

Your plan needs to be appropriate to your business. An action plan for a complex multi site operation may look very different from that of a small corner shop. It may be used to secure further funding, for example, so consider the audience and decide what your objectives are. Many of the recommendations will be of low cost and may be addressed by updated documentation and training. Often an Access Audit can be used to favourably review rent with the landlord if some capital work is required. In creating your action plan think about short term, low cost, high impact measures as a priority, then move on to considering medium and longer-term actions. Like all plans:

• State what you are trying to achieve.
• Decide who the project team are.
• Secure a budget and resources to manage the project.
• Communicate to everyone who is affected by the plan what you are doing.
• For each action define who is responsible, what will be delivered and when.
• Monitor and review your progress regularly.
• Report progress to whoever needs to be kept informed.