Disabled People Twice As Likely To Be Poor

From Jill Goble

I found the following article in Community Care and it shows just how much this Disability Equality Duty is needed. Strong equal opportunity policies are needed but the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust does not even monitor where it is employing disabled people. Officially they do not even know if employees are disabled unless they mention this on application forms. That is Jo Young et als answer to making sure hey have good equal opportunity policies. They don't. They bury their heads in the sand and give a contract to run services to The Richmond Fellowship who will create no new job opportunities. And so we see below disabled people end up twice as likely to be poor:

Disabled people twice as likely to be poor

Helen McCormack writes

An assessment of poverty in Britain has found disabled people are twice as likely to be poor than the able bodied, and the gap has widened in the past decade.

The annual report by think tank the New Policy Institute found 30 per cent of disabled adults of working age lived on 60 per cent of average income levels.

Lack of access to paid work was cited as the main reason, with disabled graduates who wanted to work considerably more likely to be unemployed than an unqualified able-bodied person.


The report, funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, also found that benefits for out of work people without dependent children were worth 20 per cent less, relative to earnings, than in 1997