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The head of one of the UK’s biggest disability charities is planning a legal challenge against the owners of the music business he founded in a dispute over its alleged failure to provide him with proper workplace support after a major illness.
The pop producer Robin Millar, who is blind, said he had been denied a request for a support worker to assist him in his work after he faced mobility challenges following cancer surgery.
Millar, who until last year was the executive chair of the record label and publisher Blue Raincoat Music, said it was “an extraordinarily painful step to take” but he wanted to show even disabled people in senior roles could face “challenging workplace situations”.
“You hope for loyalty. You hope for humanity. You hope somebody says: ‘This matters. Let’s sit down together and work out what support looks like.’ Too often that does not happen,” Millar said in a post on LinkedIn.
Millar said that with “great reluctance” he had issued proceedings in the employment tribunal “relating to my experiences within the business I cofounded and its current ownership. The claims include disability discrimination, victimisation and exclusion.”
He added: “I have spent much of my life building inclusive businesses and advocating for disabled people, and I continue to believe something very simple: inclusion is not charity and it is not political correctness. It is good leadership, good culture and good business.”
His instinct had always been to “minimise the personal impact of disability and simply keep going,” he said. But over time, as a result of advocacy work and conversations with other disabled people, he had “come to feel a responsibility to speak more openly about these experiences, particularly because so many people fear the consequences of doing so themselves. That fear is real.”
Millar produced some of the biggest-selling artists of the 1980s including Sade, Boy George and Fine Young Cannibals. He was involved in 44 No 1 hits before co-founding Blue Raincoat Music in 2014. It subsequently merged with a US-based rights company, Reservoir Media, with Millar retained to co-run day-to-day operations.
He is a high-profile disability rights campaigner and has chaired the disability charity Scope since 2020. He has often been outspoken in making the case for workplace inclusion and lobbying employers to do more to recruit and retain disabled people.
Last year Millar said he had made informal and formal requests for workplace support when recovering from surgery but these had been denied. At the time he had decided not to pursue legal action. This week he said preliminary hearings in relation to the proceedings were scheduled for next week.
A Reservoir spokesperson said: “We are aware of Sir Robin Millar’s claims and strongly maintain that we have acted with integrity and in accordance with all relevant employment legislation and the Equality Act. We are confident the facts will support a favourable resolution. As these are ongoing tribunal proceedings, we have no further comment at this stage.”
Millar’s comments came as MPs warned that too many disabled people faced a “hostile environment” in the workplace as a result of employers’ reluctance to make reasonable adjustments to help employees stay in work.
The chair of the Commons work and pensions select committee, Debbie Abrahams, said: “A major reason disabled people are much less likely to be in work or stay in work is the lack of accessibility of workplaces, something many of us take for granted.
“Although there is a legal duty to provide reasonable adjustments for disabled workers, in too many cases this isn’t happening, often out of not knowing, but also a lack of understanding of the different adjustments that could be made.”
The committee’s report said that while some businesses did exemplary work for disabled workers, all too often accessibility was not seen as a priority. One in 10 disabled people left work each year, compared with one in 20 non-disabled people, it said.
The Cabinet Office was approached for comment.
