Pre-employment health checks

The Equality Act 2010 introduced a ban on pre-employment questions to job applicants about their health, including whether they have a disability, and about their previous sickness absence record, before they are offered a role. Once the offer has been made, a reference request asking about a candidate’s sickness record is, in theory, permissible, but employers are likely to be discouraged from engaging in this practice, given the increased litigation risk.

There are exceptions to the ban:

• asking an applicant whether s/he has a disability pre-interview for the purpose of organising any reasonable adjustments for the interview process is permissible; and

• requesting information about disability for the purposes of diversity monitoring is allowed, although this information should not be available to the person carrying out the candidate selection.