Published 18 July 2026
Dear employer,
I am writing on behalf of everyone who cannot send this in their own name. You can probably guess why.
Start where I started, with a diagnosis, because when it finally came, it explained half my life, answering one question and opening all the others. The relief came first, and it was enormous. Autism. A disability. At last there was a name for why everything had always been harder, for every year I was sure I was failing at being normal. But relief does not arrive on its own, because grief walks in with it, grief for the years I spent blaming myself and for the person I might have been if the answer had come sooner. Then came the anger, because it was there to be seen all along and it went unseen, because people looked straight past it, or saw it and called it something else, shy or quiet or anything but autistic, and no one understood what they were seeing, not even me. And then, slowly, came the realisation that nothing was ever wrong with me, that I do not have to earn my place, and that I am allowed to need what I need.
But being allowed to need something and actually getting it at work are two different things, and between them stand you, and a request. I am telling you all this so you understand what it had already cost me by the time I knocked on your door, because even the knocking was hard. In 2024 the government reviewed autism and employment and found only a third of us are fully open about it at work, one in ten tell no one at all, and of those who did tell their employer, only four in ten said it had a positive impact. From the outside, though, I looked fine, and that was the mask, pretending to be normal, hiding the struggles, keeping it together until I was safely home, a mask we wear to protect ourselves, so if you never saw me struggle, it was doing its job.
The day I finally found the courage to tell my line manager, I had been rehearsing for weeks, and across the desk sat a perfectly decent person who had no idea what to do next, not a specialist, not trained for anything like this, suddenly holding the most private fact I had. What happened next depended, more than anything, on who they happened to be, and none of that was their fault, because they were sent into that conversation unprepared. So, before we go on, when you gave them a team, did you prepare them for this conversation?
So I asked for what the Equality Act calls reasonable adjustments, the official term for the changes an employer makes so a disabled person can do their job, and asking, it turned out, was never once but explanation after explanation, each to a new person, none of them trained for it either, each from the beginning, through a process no one could quite explain to me. And then I waited, because the adjustment itself is a legal duty on you but a reply is not, and the law sets no deadline for an answer, no date I can hold you to. Last year the TUC asked people in exactly this position, and among those whose employer had agreed the adjustments but not yet put them all in place, 82% had been waiting between four months and more than a year, and while I waited, I kept coping, and kept doing the job unadjusted, which was the very reason I asked.
Eventually, you decide what is reasonable, because the law says that once you know I am disabled, you must make the adjustments that are reasonable, which sounds like a standard, but in practice it is three judgements, whether I am disabled, whether I need the adjustment, and whether the adjustment is reasonable, all of them yours, all of them about a condition you do not have, and unless I am prepared to go to law about it, your judgement is final. And there is no process, because the law does not require you to have a procedure for my request, or criteria, or written reasons, or any route of appeal, but nothing stops you from building one, so what has been stopping you?
Instead, I went looking for help in your staff disability network, and I found it, because those networks are full of people like me. I love what they do, but they mostly run on borrowed time, usually led by someone disabled too, squeezing it in on top of the day job, so where you had no process, another disabled person became the process, unpaid, and when UK disability network leaders were surveyed in 2019, the challenge they named first was simply finding the voluntary time.
And through all of this, what did you see? You saw someone coping, but the mask goes back on every morning, the job still gets done, and what looks like coping is the mask again, doing its job. I have kept going because I love the work and did not want a diagnosis to cost me it, but plenty like me have given up well before this point, the request made but never acted on, the need still there, the silence mistaken for everything being fine.
So now what? There are two honest options, to drop it or to push on, and many drop it, or leave, and I understand why. But I know how many of us hit this same wall, and that it should not be a wall at all, and that is why I push on, because the only person in Britain who can enforce my rights is me. If you underpaid my wages, a state body could act against you without any complaint from me, but for discrimination there is no inspector and no regulator coming, because when MPs asked witnesses whether businesses worry about the equality watchdog acting against them, not one witness thought so. The MPs who reviewed how the Equality Act is enforced concluded that it falls to the individuals affected, and their verdict, on the record since 2019, is that the arrangement is not fit for purpose.
So no, I am not giving up, and my next step is an employment tribunal, with your legal team on one side and me on the other, in my evenings and weekends, learning a legal system from scratch, joining a queue that holds more than half a million claims. Full representation runs to tens of thousands of pounds, and each side normally pays its own costs whatever the outcome, so it is money I do not get back even if I win, and when the government last published what tribunals actually award, the typical disability award was smaller than those legal fees, and it has not published the figures since. Employers are represented nearly twice as often as the people bringing the claim, and both of us know which side that favours.
Most cases end quietly, in confidential settlements, long before any public hearing, and the questions asked are sealed inside them, which is why, of all the disability claims that ended last year, only about one in a hundred ended in a win at a full hearing, most never having reached a hearing at all, and of the few that did, four in five lost. Government research finds the quiet endings change employers least, and that the largest employers change least of all.
Even if I win, nobody can make you change anything, because a tribunal can order compensation and it can recommend, but it cannot compel, and it cannot order you to fix anything for the next person who asks. So before you tell me how inclusive you are, ask yourself what your own record would show and what your disabled staff would say, because there is no public record of how you handle requests like mine, only the one you hold, which no one else ever sees, so whatever happened between us follows me and follows you nowhere. In your machine I was one small person, easily replaced, but I am still a person.
And this is the part that costs me most to write, because to be protected by this law at all, I must prove that my disability has a substantial effect on my everyday life, and I am autistic, diagnosed as an adult, someone who got this far by hiding exactly what the law now asks me to prove, performing an ease I did not feel and paying for it privately afterwards. When researchers ask what that performance costs, they hear the same three answers, the exhaustion, the energy that keeping it up burns, and what it does to how we see ourselves. So to claim my right, I must now un-hide it all, in writing, and answer questions about it, and the better the mask worked, the less evidence I have. And pushing on at all is a kind of privilege, because it takes the words to describe it, the strength for the questions, and the money for the fight, and plenty of us have none of the three, though their rights are exactly as real as mine, and they just end more quietly.
Everything I have told you happened to someone who got the job, and most of us never get that far, because around three in ten of us are in work at all, and that is not because seven in ten of us cannot work. And even when we get in, you underuse us, because autistic graduates are the most likely of any graduate group to be overqualified for the job they hold. The professional body for HR now says the interview is more a test of social performance than of the job, and when researchers stripped the delivery away and judged autistic candidates on their words alone, the difference vanished, so you are filtering not for competence but for eye contact, and then calling the gap you made a talent shortage.
That is how it stands, so look at the hand you are holding, no deadline to answer me, the final say on what is reasonable, no process unless you choose to build one, no inspector coming, a legal team on standby, a quiet settlement whenever it suits you, a record nobody sees, and the fact that even a lost case forces you to change nothing, while I hold one card. I am allowed to ask. And here is what I want you to sit with, that almost none of this is expensive, and none of it needs Parliament to move first. You could train the manager before the conversation finds them. You could put a clock on my request, and MPs have already suggested two weeks. You could write down a process, give reasons, offer an appeal. You could hire the next one of us, interview for the job and not for the eye contact, and try us on the actual work, and the shortage you keep naming would get smaller. You could believe me the first time. Most of what we ask for is small, flexible hours, a quieter place to work, control over which days we work from home, instructions in writing, easy things that are the difference between doing the job well and doing it at a cost you never see, and Parliament concluded this year that most are simple and inexpensive. And I am not asking for charity, I am pointing at your own interest, because a government review last year priced replacing one person lost to ill health at more than eleven thousand pounds in recruitment and onboarding alone, and the people you adjust for tend to be the people you keep. It all sits with you, and that is exactly why you are the one who could end it.
From the disabled person you already employ, the one you have already lost, or the one you never hired
P.S. To everyone I am writing for, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone in it.
P.P.S. And if this letter sounds like somewhere you know, pass it on, to the person who runs your company, to the manager who decides, to the colleague who is quietly living it, because nothing in it changes until the people who hold the cards read it.