Employment: Disability
(asked on 28th March 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what progress she has made in reducing the disability employment gap in (a) Newport West constituency and (b) Wales in the last 12 months.
The figures for the disability employment gap for Wales and Newport West are available in the public domain here:
The data for Wales is available on a yearly basis in table 12. The data for Newport West is only available in 3-year periods, due to small sample sizes, and is available in table 13b.
The latest figures from the Annual Population Survey show that the disability employment gap in Wales was 32.9 percentage points in 2020/21. This is an increase of 1.1 percentage points from 2019/20 and a decrease of 1.3 percentage points from 2014/15. These changes were not statistically significant.
Figures for Newport West are only available in 3-year periods using the Annual Population Survey data. The disability employment gap for Newport West was 33.3 percentage points from 2017 to 2019 and 33.0 percentage points from 2014 to 2016. These changes were not statistically significant.
The Annual Population Survey shows that the disability employment gap in the UK was 27.9 percentage points in 2020/21. This is a decrease of 0.2 percentage points from 2019/20 and a decrease of 3.9 percentage points from 2014/15. The change from 2019/20 was not statistically significant, whilst the change from 2014/15 to 2020/21 was statistically significant.
The government has set a goal to see one million more disabled people in employment between 2017 and 2027. Previously published figures for Q1 2021 showed that, in the first four years of the goal (between Q1 2017 and Q1 2021), the number of disabled people in employment increased by 850,000. This an increase of 14,000 since year three.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have provided specialist employment support remotely and made programmes easier to access. A range of DWP initiatives are supporting disabled people to stay in and enter work. These include the Work and Health Programme, the Intensive Personalised Employment Support programme, Access to Work, Disability Confident and support in partnership with the health system, including Employment Advice in NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapy services.