Angela Matthews

Angela is the Advice Service and Policy Manager at Business Disability Forum. She manages the Advice Service and leads on policy work. She is also an advisor to a number of external research projects on disability related social policy. She has been a consultant in diversity and human resources and has also been a strategic adviser to Central Government departments. She is Chair of the Central Government Disability Inclusion Network which exists to engage diversity and disability-related professionals in Central Government in best practice exchange and solutions-focussed debates.

Diversity, and particularly disability, has been a focus for Angela throughout her career. This gives her a unique insight into disability as a business issue from a variety of perspectives. Starting in advising people with long-term conditions on nutrition and wellbeing, she then moved into occupational therapy where she specialised in older people’s mental health and physical rehabilitation). She then changed career and trained in human resources, where she quickly focussed on disability-related employee casework, data management, and workplace adjustments. She then became an advisor to senior management teams and governing bodies on equality and discrimination law in practice in the public sector. Eventually managing diversity, Angela led projects managing equality analysis procedures, establishing disability and diversity monitoring frameworks, and implementing workplace adjustment processes.

Angela’s key interests at Business Disability Forum are:

Employee engagement, productivity, and wellbeing;

Diversity data monitoring and information ethics;

Welfare reform, disability rights, and health care and disability policy development;

Social research methodologies and research management.

Angela is academically qualified (BA Hons, PgCert, PgDip, MPhil) and graduated with distinction in equality and discrimination law at postgraduate level. She was also trained in the Equality Act 2010 by the lawyers who drafted the Act itself. She has enjoyed serving as a volunteer advisor at local ‘blue light’ diversity forums on hate crime related to race, religion and belief, and sexual orientation.

Angela is currently doing her PhD in religion and social theory at the University of Kent. Her research is on the role of emotion in social policy and law formation, which includes the role of protest and social movements in securing rights and legislation for disabled people.

Angela plays the flute and the viola and spends free evenings after work at the Royal Festival Hall.