Seven in ten UK employers have failed to train either their managers on disability discrimination or their staff on neurodiversity, according to a poll of 398 HR, legal, and compliance professionals by compliance learning provider VinciWorks. Half of employers have given managers no disability discrimination training at all, 57% have given staff no neurodiversity training, and more than a third have trained neither group on either topic.
The gap matters because managers, not HR or legal, are the ones making the real-time calls that turn into tribunal claims: approving or denying a reasonable adjustment, deciding how to handle a sickness absence, or making a recruitment judgment about a neurodivergent candidate. VinciWorks also found 43% of employers have not updated their whistleblowing policies since April 2026, when sexual harassment disclosures became protected whistleblowing disclosures in the UK in their own right, and 11% have no plan to update policies at all. Untrained managers making those calls without current policy guidance is exactly the combination that produces a discrimination claim rather than a routine HR decision.
The original insight is timing. This training gap is opening just as the legal cost of getting it wrong is rising: from January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal claims in the UK drops from two years to six months, and the compensation cap disappears entirely. “Seven in ten employers telling us they have not trained managers on disability discrimination or staff on neurodiversity should worry any HR or legal team,” said Nick Henderson-Mayo, VinciWorks’ head of compliance. That warning lands alongside a run of costly disability cases already on the record, including a recent screen-reader accommodation denial that cost one employer $200,000, and it comes as regulators more broadly treat compliance gaps around protected-characteristic programs as active legal exposure, not a training backlog to get to eventually.
Source: VinciWorks
