One in Eleven. And We Already Know Why

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A woman in a wheelchair sitting at the desk with a keyboard and open files she's wearing a yellow top short sleeved with a short sleeved jumper. Browne over it she's looking away from the camera.

New figures this week show that one in eleven disabled people is now unemployed.

That's the highest rate in six years. And disabled people are losing jobs at nearly ten times the rate of non-disabled people. 

The government is concerned. Charities are alarmed. Reports are being written. 

But here's the thing. We're not short of explanations.

We've known for decades that disabled people face discrimination at the very first hurdle — the job application. Cardiff University researchers sent over 4,000 fictitious applications to real employers between 2022 and 2023. The only difference between them was whether the applicant disclosed a disability. Disabled candidates had a 15% lower chance of being called for an interview. For less skilled roles, that gap rose to 21%.

Here's the part that really stays with me. When researchers gave disabled applicants better qualifications — stronger CVs, better references — it made almost no difference. The discrimination persisted anyway.

And employers who advertised themselves as 'equal opportunities'? Or those holding Disability Confident accreditation? No reduction in discrimination whatsoever.

I've worked with employers on this for many years. I don't think most of them are deliberately cruel. What I do think is that line managers — the people who actually make hiring decisions — often see disabled applicants as a risk. A risk that the person won't deliver. A risk that if things don't work out, they'll face a complicated process. A risk that reasonable adjustments will cost a lot of time and money.

Some of those fears have a grain of truth. The Access to Work scheme, which funds workplace adjustments, is currently taking an average of 109 days to process an application. If you were a line manager trying to fill a post quickly and knew there was a chance the process would stall for 3 months, what would you do?

I know what many of them do.

But those fears are also wildly out of proportion to reality. Most reasonable adjustments cost little or nothing. Most disabled employees, given the right support, perform just as well as their non-disabled colleagues. The evidence on this is not new or contested.

And yet here we are.

The BBC's Inside Out programme ran an experiment a few years ago. They sent identical CVs to 100 jobs under two names — Adam and Mohamed. Adam got 12 interview invitations. Mohamed got four. A professor who reviewed the results pointed out that the same experiment had been run 13 years earlier with essentially the same outcome.

Thirteen years. The same result.

I think about that a lot when I hear about new awareness campaigns, new accreditation schemes, and new government initiatives. Because the problem isn't that employers don't know discrimination is wrong. The problem is that there are very few real consequences when it happens anyway.

The Equality Act exists. Disability Confident exists. Awareness training exists. And still, a disabled person applying for a job is significantly less likely to be invited to interview than an equally qualified non-disabled person, for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job.

The disability employment gap has just widened to nearly 30 percentage points. That is not a mystery. It is not a puzzle waiting to be solved.

It is the entirely predictable result of a system where the rules exist but the enforcement doesn't.

The question isn't what we should do. We know what we should do.

The question is why we keep finding reasons not to do it.

Have you seen this play out in your organisation's hiring process — or have you found approaches that genuinely make a difference? I'd be interested to hear.


Sources

1. Cardiff University / University of Liverpool field experiment on disability hiring discrimination (2022–23): Cardiff University news release

2. Work Foundation / Lancaster University, Labour Market Statistics, February 2026: Lancaster University Work Foundation

3. BBC Inside Out London, Adam and Mohamed CV experiment (2017): Diversity UK summary

4. National Audit Office report on Access to Work delays (February 2026): Irwin Mitchell Employment Law summary

5. Systematic review of 69 disability hiring discrimination studies (2025): ScienceDirect — Disability discrimination in hiring

 

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