Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, (a) how many and (b) what proportion of disabled adults of working age in (i) England, (ii) Wales and (iii) Scotland received support from the Access to Work grant scheme in each of the last three years.

When considering your questions, it should be noted that those that use the Access to Work scheme are not a direct subset of the disabled adults of working age. Robust proportions cannot be estimated by simply dividing figures for Access to Work by figures for number of disabled adults of working age. This is because the data would come from different data sources and are different data types.

To be eligible for Access to Work a person must be 16 or older, there is no upper age limit to eligibility therefore some people who receive Access to Work will not be considered working age (16-64 years old). Also Access to Work is available to those that have a disability or health condition (physical or mental) that makes it hard for them to do parts of their job or get to and from work therefore covers a broad range of people not just those who identify themselves as ‘disabled’.

When answering your question, we have interpreted ‘received support’ as received a payment.

The number of people who received a payment from Access to Work for each financial year can be found in Table 8 of the annual Access to Work Statistics publication. Table 8 shows the number of people who received a payment for any Access to Work provision by various customer characteristics including by region.

The latest Access to Work statistics can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/access-to-work-statistics-april-2007-to-march-2019

Please note, number of people for each region is based on residency of the beneficiary as opposed to place of work. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10.