Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the income gap between workers with special educational needs and disabilities and those without.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

A response to the noble Baroness’ Parliamentary Question of 28 February is attached.

The Baroness Eaton DBE BL

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

2 March 2023

Dear Lady Eaton,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what assessment has been made of the income gap between workers with special educational needs and disabilities and those without (HL5984).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) does not currently hold estimates of the total income gap specifically. However, the ONS has published relevant analysis on the average earnings of disabled and non-disabled employees in the UK.

The publication Disability pay gaps in the UK: 2021 [1] provides the latest available information from the Annual Population Survey (APS) comparing earnings of disabled and non-disabled employees up to 2021.

In 2021, disabled employees earnt an average (median) of £12.10 per hour and non-disabled employees £14.03 per hour, a difference of 13.8%. This difference has widened slightly since 2014 when disabled employees earnt an average 11.7% less than non-disabled employees.

This publication looks at the impact of some of the factors that may affect disabled employees pay such as their impairment type or severity. For example, in 2021 disabled employees with autism as their main impairment had a wider difference in average pay than disabled people with other types of main impairment, having an average pay 33.5% less than non-disabled employees. Disabled employees who were limited a lot in their day-to-day activities had a wider difference in average pay to non-disabled employees (19.9% less) than disabled employees whose day-to-day activities were limited a little (12.1% less).

This publication also shows that after controlling for the differences in personal characteristics such as age, where they live and occupation type, differences in average pay between disabled and non-disabled employees were narrower but persisted.

The largest narrowing was seen for disabled employees with autism as their main impairment, where the difference in average pay to non-disabled employees was estimated to be 9.9% after accounting for differences in personal and job characteristics between disabled and nondisabled employees, compared with 33.5% before doing so.

For further context, other ONS data, such as that published within Outcomes for disabled people in the UK: 20212 , provides the latest available information on outcomes for disabled people across a range of areas of life including employment, education, social participation, housing, well-being, loneliness and crime. We will of course take your question into account as we continue to produce analysis relevant to the experiences of disabled people, working to ensure that it is inclusive and highlights the experiences of different groups.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/disability/articles/disability paygapsintheuk/2021

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/disability/articles/outcome sfordisabledpeopleintheuk/2021