Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the effect of the covid-19 outbreak on disabled (a) employees and (b) business owners; and if she will make a statement.

We continue to monitor employment of disabled people using the quarterly Labour Force Survey along with other relevant sources. Collection of this information is contemporaneous with the covid-19 outbreak. There will be an interval until data needed to assess the effects of the outbreak is available.

Labour Force Survey statistics for the first quarter of 2020, will be reported by the Office for National Statistics on 19 May 2020, covering the very start of the covid-19 outbreak in March. Statistics for the second quarter of 2020 will be available in August.

The latest available disability employment statistics for quarter 4 2019, show that the employment rate for working age disabled people was 54.1%, compared with 82.2% for non-disabled people. Therefore, there was an employment rate gap between disabled and non-disabled people of 28.1 percentage points. The disability employment gap fell by 2.1 percentage points on the year. These statistics also show that similar proportions of disabled and non-disabled people in work were self-employed; 15% of disabled people in work were self-employed compared with 14% of non-disabled people.

The Office for National Statistics is producing a range of wider information about the social and economic impacts of covid-19 such as the Business Impact of Coronavirus (BIC) survey. Statistics from the ONS Omnibus survey for 3 April 2020 to 13 April 2020 show that a lower proportion of disabled people than non-disabled people were worried about aspects of work and household finances.