Remploy, the UK’s provider of employment services for disabled people, recorded a 70% increase in the number of disabled people it supported into jobs in mainstream employment in the first quarter of this year.

This record number of job entries has been achieved while the company is in consultation with stakeholders on its proposals for a strategic shift to enable it to quadruple the number of jobs it finds for disabled people in mainstream employment.

Bob Warner, Remploy chief executive, said: “These new figures show that investing in preparing and training disabled people for mainstream employment works. In the last 15 months we have opened seven city centre recruitment branches around the UK and we are now seeing the  benefits.

“Almost 30% of the disabled people we helped to find a job went through the branches and we will be increasing the network to 20 branches by the end of the year.”

In the first three months of the financial year ended in June, Remploy placed almost 1,500 disabled people into employment and added 10,500 vacancies to its books.