The NHS’s Adult Social Care Framework’s statistics have shown that for two years now, only around 5% of adults with a learning disability are in paid employment in England.

This is immensely worrying, particularly when we’re now forecasted to enter a recession – the second within a decade. Amidst the worst cost of living crisis in over forty years, how does it make sense for such a smaller number of people to be at work when we face a national workforce shortage? How is the Government going to tackle this challenge?

COVID-19 signalled many unexpected changes to the way we all work, but for many disabled people, there has been little to no support in helping them transition to these new methods and workplace cultures. Even before the pandemic, our community faced significant inequalities in work opportunities and pay, with a knock-on effect of poorer physical and mental health than non-disabled people. As the figures have shown, we are still grappling with these fundamental flaws in our economic system, and we are still failing to meet our obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

As far back as 2019, I made it clear, on behalf of United Response and the thousands of adults we support, that a presumption of employability should exist for everybody, regardless of their disability. Equality of opportunity and a person-centred approach should be at the heart of any government’s policy to support people with learning disabilities to find paid work. 

As we transition out of the pandemic, fairer and equitable working opportunities for disabled people must be opened urgently. United Response is working hard in communities across England and Wales to help realise this for our service users and their families. Thanks to generous funding from the Wolfson Foundation, earlier this year we opened a new training service in Truro that supports up to 85 young people to gain accredited hospitality qualifications. Similarly, our UR Consultants are working closely with employers across Manchester, York, and Cornwall on how to improve their practices and workplaces’ accessibility.  

But we in the social care sector can only do so much on our own. What we need is targeted action to ensure people with learning disabilities are not only accessing employment opportunities but are also being fairly paid like anyone else in a job. There is a clear role for the Equalities Office and the Department of Work and Pensions to make this the norm across society, in line with prior commitments under the National Disability Strategy to reduce the disability employment gap – along with dedicated monitoring from the Cabinet Office’s Disability Unit for future policy solutions.

In our earlier submission on the SEND green paper, we set out a range of specific actions that the Government can take now and in the long term to tackle unemployment, especially for younger disabled people. To begin with, one solution to reduce workplace inequality would be amending the Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England to include cognitive assessments that identify learning support needs.

We would like to see further investment from DWP in a wide-reaching campaign to raise awareness amongst public and private sector employers about the benefits of recruiting young people with SEND through an apprenticeship route. This should be done in tandem with increased funding for specialist SEND job coaches to help employers understand the needs of young people with SEND, as well as support students on their employment journeys.

We also want to see Supported Internships as an access route for young people with SEND to achieve an apprenticeship.

I would urge both candidates for Number 10 to publicly pledge to prioritise addressing this glaring inequality in our workforce, and to take meaningful action to that effect during their first one hundred days as Prime Minister. I would also urge the incoming Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to make a similar public commitment, and pledge to invest greater funds towards the Access to Work and Disability Confident schemes.