Reducing the Disability Employment Gap in Britain

Disabled people are an important under-utilised resource in the context of skills and labour shortages.

The high rate of economic inactivity, alongside a higher unemployment rate, explains why people with disabilities have a low employment rate. People with disabilities have an employment rate that is 28.9 percentage points lower than that of people without disabilities. This difference is often referred to as the disability employment gap.

On 2 October 2019 the government released a research briefing report People with disabilities in employment which we encourage you to download and read.

In November 2018 Rachel Suff talked Disability Confident, line managers, and pay gaps in her CIPD Voice article ‘How can we shrink the disability employment gap?’

‘We need to speed up the rate at which we are narrowing the disability employment gap in the UK, and we believe the CIPD’s community of people management professionals have an inspirational as well as a practical role to play’
Rachel Suff, Public Policy Adviser, Employment Relations

Please join us in collaboration with the Manchester Industrial Relations Society on 17 October from 17:45 at MMU (Manchester M15) to learn more about evidence-based policy and practice to include more disabled people in the workplace.

Our speaker Professor Kim Hoque, Professor of HRM at the University of Warwick is an expert in the field and advises The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Disability.