Disability and employment reports

The Resolution Foundation's report, Retention deficit: a new approach to boosting employment for people with health problems and disabilities,states that in order to make significant progress on the government's ambition to halve the disability employment gap, a comprehensive set of changes will be needed, alongside a cultural shift in how we view the connections between disability, health and employment in this country. The purpose of this report is to offer a new set of ideas that can be considered and developed in the new Green Paper due to be published later this year. In particular, they see an opportunity for a renewed focus on one area of policy where they think attention has often been lacking: the employment relationship and exits from work connected to disability and ill-health.

A copy of this report is available on their website.

Also, the Trades Union Congress has published Disability and Employment, which claims that the government is “years behind schedule” in delivering its manifesto commitment to halve the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people by 2020 and it will be 2030 before the commitment is delivered. The report's main findings are:

1. At the current rate of change, from Q1 2016, it would take 58 quarters, until Q2 2030 to halve the employment gap

2. The TUC have calculated that by the end of this Parliament (Q2 2020) at the current rate of change there would still only be a 52.4 per cent employment rate for disabled people. This means that with a number of provisos and assuming the current rate of change continues, only around a third of the government’s goal would have been achieved (31 per cent).

3. The latest employment rate of disabled people remains at below 50 per cent, at 47.2 per cent for Q4 2015. It averaged at 46.6 per cent between 2008 and 2014. The latest employment rate for non-disabled people is 80.3 per cent, and the average rate between 2008 and 2015 was 78.0 per cent.

4. The disability employment penalty rate averaged at -31.4 per cent between 2008 and 2015. The ILO unemployment penalty rate averaged at 4.4 per cent. The disability penalty is the gap between an employment outcome measure for disabled and non-disabled people

5. In Q4 2014 the average pay for all disabled people was 14.8 per cent lower than all non-disabled people. Average pay increased for both non-disabled people and disabled workers from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015. However, the gap narrowed between them in Q4 2015, when the average pay per hour for disabled people was 12.3 per cent less than non-disabled people. The average weekly pay for part-time disabled workers decreased between Q4 2014 and Q4 2015 compared with other workers