Remploy
Remploy Head Office
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| Formation | 1945 |
|---|---|
| Type | Disability organisation |
| Legal status | Private company (09457025) |
| Location |
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Official language
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English |
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Chief Executive
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Gareth Parry |
| Website | http://www.remploy.co.uk/ |
Remploy is an organisation in the United Kingdom which provides employment placement services for disabled people. It is a major welfare-to-work provider, delivering a range of contracts and employment programmes, for people with substantial barriers to work. Between 2009 and 2014, it found 100,000 jobs for disabled people.
Historically, it also directly employed disabled people in a number of factories, owned by Remploy itself, and subsidised by the UK government, though this was phased out at the start of the 21st century, under the prevailing view that disabled people should have mainstream jobs.
Remploy was originally established under the terms of the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, to directly employ disabled persons in specialised factories. It opened its first factory in Bridgend, Wales, in 1946. Over the following decades it established a network of 83 factories across the UK making a wide variety of products. These were organised into a number of sub-businesses, such as Remploy e-cycle, which dealt with the safe disposal and re-cycling of electrical appliances.
In the late 20th century it also moved into service businesses, such as monitoring CCTV images.
To further subsidise Remploy businesses, the government made regulations, in 2006, stating that every public body should reserve at least one contract for supported businesses (those where over 50% of employees are disabled); in this way, public bodies could fulfil corporate social responsibility objectives. These Public Contracts Regulations (specifically, Regulation 7) restrict the tendering process for goods or services to supported businesses
In the later years of the Blair ministry, at the start of the 21st century, Remploy underwent a major change to its operation, and branched out into providing general employment assistance for disabled people, and others with barriers to employment. After the closure of most Remploy factories, the provision of these assistance services became Remploy's principal purpose.
In 2006, Remploy Employment Services opened its first high street branch in Newhall Street, Birmingham, since that date a further forty branches and thirty offices have opened from Glasgow to Plymouth, often in the same general location as their former factory sites. The five-year project to develop Remploy as a high street brand has allowed the business to support its vision of assisting over 10,000 disabled customers into mainstream employment, a target achieved in the financial year of 2009-10.
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