Disability

Protections at work have been updated under the Equality Act 2010 but the climate has otherwise been difficult for disabled people who rely to any degree on the benefits system or government support. This situation looks set to worsen as the Conservative government prepares to cut another £12 billion from the welfare budget:

• closure of the Remploy factories that provided employment for disabled people with substantial barriers to work. Of the 1,795 disabled workers made redundant after March 2012, only 535 were back in work by October 2013;

• 429,000 disabled people moved from work to unemployment or inactivity in 2013, according to disability charity Scope, so while 207,000 disabled people did find work there was a net reduction of 220,000. Its A million futures report indicated that the vast majority (91%) of disabled people have worked at some point but, within two years of acquiring a disability, only just over a third (36%) continued to have a job. Overall, less than half (45%) of disabled adults were in work compared with 71% of the total adult population;

• Atos’s contract to administer work capability assessments for sick and disabled people ended early in 2014 in the light of mounting evidence that it had wrongly judged hundreds of thousands of people to be fit for work and ineligible for benefits;

• a Freedom of Information disclosure by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) earlier this year revealed that people receiving Employment Support Allowance (ESA) because of long-term mental health problems were being “sanctioned” (having their benefits cut) at a rate of more than 100 a day;

• in June 2014, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a report into Personal Independence Payments (PIPs), branding their implementation a fiasco; and in June 2015 the High Court found that delays of at least nine months for two individuals were unreasonable and unlawful (although it also decided that their human rights were not breached so they were not entitled to compensation) — 78,700 were waiting to hear if they could make a PIP claim;

• the employment rate for people suffering from mental health problems remained at just over 10%, according to the TUC, despite a government disability and health employment strategy with the declared aim of increasing employment among the 11.5 million adults of working age with a disability or health condition.

The government says it sees employment as having “a wide range of health benefits” but it is also motivated by the view that Britain “cannot afford to lose out on the contribution that disabled people can make”. By the end of 2014, 200 companies and organisations had signed up to its Disability Confident campaign which encourages employers to break down barriers, challenge negative attitudes and increase employment. They include Dudley Council, Barclays Bank and Fujitsu.

www.ecdp.org.uk/disabilityconfident