Disabled Employment In Scotland - Initial Findings

14th September 2023

A report by the Fraser of Allender Institute.

Disabled adults are significantly less likely to be in work compared to adults without disabilities. In Scotland, 81% of working aged adults without disabilities had jobs in 2021, compared to just under 50% of adults with disabilities. This discrepancy of 31 percentage points - called the "disability employment gap" - is larger in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK (Chart 1).

Scotland has a goal of reducing the disability employment gap by half between 2016 and 2039. The 2021 numbers, encouragingly, show an improvement of 6 percentage points. A higher proportion of disabled people moved into work in Scotland between 2014 and 2021 compared to the UK as a whole, as well.

In 2023, the DWP published a report on the employment of disabled people in the UK. This report looked at the reason why employment among people with disabilities has increased, while employment for the rest of the population has stayed roughly the same.

The DWP report highlighted four reasons behind the growth in the number of disabled people in employment:

Disability prevalence has increased in the UK, and the most common types of disabilities have changed.
The non-disabled employment rate has increased, implying that more jobs are available to both groups.
The disability employment gap has been narrowing overall.
There are more individuals in the working-age population.
The level of detail provided in the DWP report for the UK is difficult to replicate for Scotland with publicly available data: smaller sample sizes north of the border mean that more restrictions are placed on the data available to ensure that appropriate care has been taken with interpreting the robustness of results.

The Fraser of Allander Institute, in collaboration with the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) are undertaking work to understand whether the same factors are driving changes in Scotland, and if not, what is different here and why.

This work is ongoing and future articles will get into more of the detail. This article sets the scene about the scale of the issue in Scotland vs the UK based on what know from data currently available.

What's the state of disability employment in Scotland?
Scotland has a higher proportion of working-aged disabled people compared to the UK. It also has a lower rate of employment among disabled people, and a larger gap in employment between people with and without disabilities. Employment rates are noticeably different for different types of disabilities in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK, and disabled peoples are less likely to have educational qualifications in Scotland.

Read the full article HERE