Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many disabled people the Work and Health Programme support helps into work per year; and what estimate his Department has made of the number of how many disabled people that will be helped into work by Universal Support per year.

The latest Work and Health Programme statistics to November 2023 are published in the latest statistics on .GOV.UK and in Stat-Xplore.

There are three eligibility groups – disability, early access and long term unemployed. Up to November 2023, 77% of starts were from the disability group. For cohorts starting up to November 2021 (who had been on the programme for 24 months at the time of release) 47% had achieved first earnings and 32% achieved a job outcome. The number of job outcomes achieved in each year can be found in the table below:

Number of WHP job outcomes achieved per year in the disability group

Note: there will also be disabled people in the early access group and long term unemployed, but we are unable to identify those people – therefore these numbers will be underestimates of the total numbers of disabled people who achieve job outcomes.

Further information about definitions are explained in the Work and Health Programme statistics: background information and methodology, in particular:

• First earnings from employment – the point at which a participant achieves their first earnings from their first employment whilst on the programme. A participant may not necessarily go on to achieve a job outcome. Statistics on first earnings from employment do not include earnings from self-employment.

• Job outcomes – a provider is classed as achieving a job outcome when a participant reaches either a specified level of earnings once in employment (which varies across the different areas – see detailed explanation of job outcome expectations for details) or 6 months of being in self-employment.

Universal Support will support up to 100,000 disabled people, people with health conditions and people with additional barriers to employment into sustained work per year, once fully rolled out.