Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent progress her Department has made on the commitments set out in the Improving Lives: the Work, Health, Disability Green Paper.

In 2017 ‘Improving Lives’ set out the Government’s goal to see one million more disabled people in work by 2027. In the first three years of the goal, between 2017 and 2020, the number of disabled people in employment increased by 800,000.

We are continuing to build our evidence base on what works, through ongoing research, tests and large scale trials including of Employment Advice in NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapy services and Individual Placement and Support in partnership with the health system.

In 2019, our ‘Health is Everyone's Business’ consultation set out proposals to support and encourage employers to minimise the risk of ill-health related job loss among their employees, including employers incentives and obligations, reforms to SSP, and Occupational Health reform. We intend to publish our response shortly.

The Department is bringing forward a Green Paper on health and disability support to consider how we improve our current service so it’s better and easier to use, explore how we provide extra support to navigate the system, and understand how we improve our employment support offer.

One of the commitments from Improving Lives was to publish annual statistics to support the monitoring of progress on disability employment. The most recent statistics, published in 2020, provide detailed analysis and break downs of the number of disabled people in employment. The latest statistics are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/the-employment-of-disabled-people-2019