DWP gets off scot-free in government review of disabled people’s rights

A sweeping new review funded by the government’s Disability Unit has laid bare the entrenched inequalities faced by disabled people in the UK labour market. But in a bitter twist, it is the government’s own Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that is one of the most persistent drivers of discrimination against the very group it claims to support.

The report, titled Disabled People’s Employment in the UK: A Thematic Review of the Literature, synthesises over a decade’s worth of academic research and grey literature spanning 2010 to 2021. Led by the University of Leeds and Disability Rights UK, it presents a comprehensive and damning picture of systemic exclusion and disadvantage.

Disabling inequality across society

The review highlights staggering disparities between disabled and non-disabled people:

• In the final quarter of 2023, there were 10.21 million disabled people of working age in the UK—making up 24% of the population.
• Only 5.53 million were in employment, yielding a disabled employment rate of 54.2%, compared to 82% for non-disabled people.
• The resulting employment gap of 27.8 percentage points has remained stubbornly persistent for years.

While these headline figures have marginally improved since 2013, the report argues that the narrowing gap often reflects increased declarations of disability, rather than a meaningful shift in employer behaviour or accessibility.

The thematic review from the Disability Unit identifies a litany of structural hurdles disabled people face throughout the employment journey. Recruitment processes were often inaccessible or overtly discriminatory. Many employers held implicit biases, assuming disabled candidates were less capable or more costly to accommodate.

One study cited found that applicants who disclosed a disability were 26% less likely to receive a positive employer response. Another revealed that only 27% of employers provided disability awareness training for their staff.

Once in work, disabled employees frequently encountered a lack of reasonable adjustments, limited opportunities for progression, and an organisational culture that undermined their well-being.

The carceral welfare state: the DWP’s role in discrimination

What the report does not explore—but is impossible to ignore—is the DWP’s own role in sustaining this hostile environment.

For over a decade, the department has presided over punitive welfare reforms that have disproportionately harmed disabled people. From the widely discredited Work Capability Assessment (WCA) to the rollout of Universal Credit, the DWP has cultivated a culture of suspicion and surveillance.

• Since 2010, the DWP has cut over £30 billion in social security spending, much of it from disability benefits.
• According to Disability Rights UK, over 2.5 million sanctions were issued between 2010 and 2020, with disabled claimants disproportionately targeted.
• A 2023 investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found “serious concerns” about how the DWP treated disabled people, especially those with mental health conditions.

However, the most damning analyses have consistently come from the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). It found that successive UK governments had committed “grave” and “systematic” violations of disabled people’s human rights. Yet without irony, the Disability Unit report cites the very UNCRPD rules that the government breached to back up its report.

Government promises vs a disabled reality

Moreover, the DWP funds back-to-work schemes that frequently funnel disabled people into insecure, low-paid roles with minimal support or long-term prospects. Meanwhile, private contractors delivering disability employment services have come under fire for low success rates and prioritising targets over individual needs.

The government’s flagship pledge to reduce the disability employment gap has been repeated across successive administrations. In 2017, then-prime minister Theresa May promised to get one million more disabled people into work by 2027.

Yet critics argue that such goals are meaningless when the root causes of exclusion remain unaddressed—and when the DWP’s own policies contradict its rhetoric. For example, the review highlights how disabled people are often blamed for their unemployment, with policymakers framing the issue as one of “individual deficit” rather than systemic bias. Then, government initiatives like “Disability Confident” are voluntary and largely unenforced, leaving them as “box-ticking exercises”.

We are not the problem – the DWP is

Overall, this review confirms what disabled people have been saying for years: the barriers are not in their bodies, but in a society—and a state—that refuses to accommodate them. The DWP cannot continue to act as both support service and enforcer without perpetuating the very discrimination it claims to fix.

The report calls for a “fundamental reimagining” of how the labour market engages with disability. This includes mandatory accessibility standards and greater enforcement of equality laws.

However, it must also include reforms to DWP processes that are currently punitive and traumatic.

Until the DWP ends its hostile approach to disabled claimants, any research—no matter how comprehensive—risks becoming a fig leaf for ongoing injustice.

Featured image via the Canary