All Party Parliamentary Group on disability – Ahead of the arc report

The response to the consultation on ‘Halving the Disability Gap’ is now out in the form of a 65 page report entitled “Ahead of the Arc” – a Contribution to Halving the Disability Employment Gap, published by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Disability. Members will want to peruse this far reaching report for themselves. It does recognise the ‘absence of effective vocational rehabilitation in Britain’. You may wish to know that the VRA made a submission to the consultation.

The UK Government was elected on a manifesto commitment to halve the disability employment gap i.e. the difference between the rates of employed non-disabled people and employed disabled people. The gap is 32 percentage points in 2016 so the target is to hit 16 percentage points in 2020. This requires moving 1,074,000 (a third more) disabled people into employment and raising their employment rate from 48% to 64%. The gap has narrowed by 1.3 percentage points in the four years since 2013. If this rate continues, and all else remains equal, it will take almost 50 years (until 2065) to narrow the gap to its target of 16 percentage points.

Read the report here

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