New DWP figures fail again to provide clarity on employment disadvantage faced by disabled people

The government’s annual publication of figures on disability employment has failed yet again to show how disabled people’s experience in the jobs market has changed over the last year.

The “main points” of yesterday’s (Wednesday) publication on the employment of working-age disabled people show that no easy conclusions can be drawn from the annual figures, because of the way they have been presented.

The figures show 5.6 million disabled people in employment in the UK in April to June 2026 and a disability employment rate of 53 per cent, compared to 82.4 per cent of non-disabled people in work.

This suggests the disability employment gap – the difference between the employment rates of disabled and non-disabled people – is still about 30 per cent.

It also says that the proportion of disabled people in work increased by 0.2 percentage points in the latest quarter (April to June 2026) while the disability employment gap decreased by 0.3 percentage points compared with the same quarter in 2025, although neither change was statistically significant.

But the annual figures for 2025-26 – not included in the main report – show an increase in the disability employment gap, from 26.8 per cent in 2024-25 to 28 per cent in 2025-26, following a fall in the disability employment rate from 55.3 per cent in 2024-25 to 54.3 per cent in 2025-26.

Dr Alex Louise Pearl, policy and campaigns officer for Disability Rights UK, said the figures show the disability employment gap remained “relatively consistent”.

She said: “With almost one in four people of working-age identifying as disabled, it is imperative that more is done to increase the accessibility, flexibility and security of the labour market for disabled people.

“The government needs to develop a clear and holistic national strategy to close the disability employment gap.

“This should include: driving the creation of sufficient flexible, accessible, part-time and entry-level roles; ensuring adequate support provision through funding the Access to Work scheme and the implementation of reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010; statutory pay gap and workforce reporting; enhanced pay transparency; and a complete overhaul of the Disability Confident scheme.”

Caroline Collier, chief executive of Inclusion Barnet, said: “Many disabled people would like to work but are locked out of the jobs market due to barriers.

“The disability employment gap is persistent and hovers just under the 30 per cent mark, which is a massive waste of talent.

“Of course, paid work is not a realistic option for everyone and that needs to be respected, and people need to be supported, but we need to create decent opportunities for people able to work.

“Therefore, the solution to the disability employment gap must include an expectation that employers will step up and offer decent, accessible job opportunities – we can’t just rely on providing employment support to disabled people.

“And we must totally reject damaging and discouraging threats to disabled people’s social security benefits, whether that be cuts to the system overall or individual ‘sanctions’.

“More poverty can do nothing but harm – let’s have a disability strategy resting on real opportunity and not on either threats or empty promises.”

DWP’s report does little to clarify the actual trend in employment of disabled people and the degree of disadvantage they face in the jobs market.

This is chiefly because of the complicating factor of “disability prevalence”.

Disability News Service has been reporting for more than six years on research which has repeatedly shown how the last government’s supposed success in increasing disability employment and slashing the disability employment gap was merely due to a statistical quirk.

Disabled activists were left bemused for years as official figures from the Office for National Statistics appeared to show disabled people were increasingly likely to find work in comparison with non-disabled people, reducing the disability employment gap.

But research by academics from Cardiff Business School – part of the Disability@Work group of researchers – showed that these figures simply reflected a sharp rise in the proportion of people describing themselves as having an impairment that limited their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.

They showed that – once you allowed for the increase in the proportion of people describing themselves as having an activity-limiting impairment – the disability employment gap actually rose slightly between 2013 and 2020, although it fell significantly under the last Labour government, between 1998 and 2009.

This week’s government publication says that an estimated 60 per cent of the change in the number of disabled people in employment between 2013 and 2026 was driven by disability prevalence, while an estimated 20 per cent was caused by changes in the employment rate of non-disabled people; and five per cent by increases in the working-age population.

It estimates that just 15 per cent of any improvement has been driven by changes in the actual disability employment gap.

Yesterday’s publication does say that the disability employment gap is wider for men; older (aged 50 to 64) people; people with no qualifications; people living in social housing; people not living in a couple; and those living in Northern Ireland, Scotland, the north of England, the West Midlands and Wales.

The figures are based on the Labour Force Survey and the Annual Population Survey, both produced by the Office for National Statistics.

A DWP spokesperson said: “For too long, disabled people have been denied the support they need to get into work and build a better life.

“The latest disability employment statistics reflect the fact that the welfare system we inherited denies people the opportunities they deserve to find good, secure jobs that work for them.

“However, we are making progress with the number of disabled people in employment increasing by 150,000 in the last year to 5.6 million, and we continue to invest £3.5 billion in personalised disability employment support, supporting disabled people and people with health conditions to fulfil their full potential.”

Meanwhile, the government has rejected plans to strengthen the law on what it calls combined discrimination (usually known as intersectional discrimination).

This is discrimination which takes place when a combination of grounds, such as disability and race discrimination, “interact with each other in a way that produces distinct and specific discrimination”.

Responding to the results of April’s call for evidence on potential changes to equality law, the government said it had decided not to introduce section 14 of the Equality Act 2010 on combined discrimination because it “would not increase equality law protection and could create legal uncertainty” and risked causing “added complexity and procedural challenges”.

It said it intended instead to produce guidance that explained how the law already protects against combined discrimination.

It referenced research, published last week, which found that between two and six per cent of discrimination claims and complaints feature intersectional discrimination.

Of those cases – identified on a legal database – involving multiple discrimination, the most common combination was disability and race (16.4 per cent), followed by race and sex (12.5 per cent), disability and sex (9.5 per cent) and disability and age (9.4 per cent).