Disabled people are paid £2 an hour less at work. Here's how to change this grossly unfair situation

Imagine being paid £2 less per hour than another worker who’s doing a similar job. That’s around £70 a week if you work full-time and, day by underpaid day, adds up to a galling £3,640 a year. 

It’s infuriating, isn’t it? Especially when you realise your colleague is valued more and paid more simply because they’re not disabled and you are. 

This grossly unfair, 12.7% ‘disability pay gap’ has been going on unchanged for a decade. In all that time, nothing effective has been done to fix it.

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But new official figures, released last week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show this is exactly what is happening in the UK right now.

ONS analysis found that in 2023 disabled employees are estimated to have earned a median of £13.69 per hour while non-disabled employees are likely to have earned £15.69 per hour. This pay gap, it reported, “has remained relatively stable since 2014”.

The data also highlighted another iniquity – the pay gap is even wider for workers who are limited ‘a lot’ in their day-to-day activities by their disabilities. For them, the pay gap is a shameful 17.1%, compared to 11.2% for disabled employees who are limited ‘a little’. 

Employees with autism fared worst of all, being paid more than a quarter (27.9%) less. Got epilepsy? Take a 26.9% pay cut. Severe or specific learning difficulties will see your pay docked by a fifth (20.3%).

At Sense, a national disability charity, we know disabled people deserve so much better. We see the despair and frustration this raw deal at work causes people as they struggle to find jobs where employers will meet their needs through reasonable adjustments and let them flourish.

When we conducted our own research, over half (52%) of people with complex disabilities in work told us they’d taken on a less challenging role because their needs as a disabled person were not being met by employers.

All those people who could and should be able to fulfil their full individual potential at work are instead blocked from doing so and are left to pay a life-long financial penalty.

And then there’s the impact on companies, who could be benefiting from disabled people’s skills and experiences, but through lack of foresight and planning – or in the worst cases discrimination  – are failing to do so.

Some might argue underpaid disabled people should simply find themselves another job, secure a promotion and get a pay rise that way. But this ignores the barriers so many disabled people face when it comes to searching for work, and across their everyday lives

For example, almost all jobs these days are advertised online, which makes them difficult to access for those who have visual impairments and don’t have easy access to the right technical screen readers.

You might expect job centres to provide this technology in 2024. That would be a logical assumption. But Sense research has found zero job centres across the country provide assistive technology like screen readers or braille displays. 

Even if this barrier is overcome, there are often problems setting up interviews that no non-disabled jobseeker has to face.

Instead of prepping answers to recruiters’ questions, in the run-up to an interview a deaf jobseeker might be worrying about whether a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter has been booked and another disabled applicant might worry if their wheelchair will get into the building and fit into the interview room.

But the most infuriating thing of all is that we know it is completely possible for employers and the government to finally take action and fix this situation.

At Sense, we run an employment service, that helps people with complex disabilities, who are able to work and desperately want to work, to find the right role for them and take on interviews with confidence. 

We know that with the right support in place, disabled people can thrive in their careers. As well as be huge assets for employers. 

To turn this situation around, the government needs to urgently equip every job centre across the country with the assistive technology many disabled people need to look for work and promotions. A £5m assistive technology fund should be set up to make this game-changing – and affordable – change happen fast.

We also want to see all UK employers adopting best practices to allow disabled people into the workplace. At the moment, they can apply to become a ‘Disability Confident’ employer – but all too often this is a tick box exercise that looks good to outsiders but does little to help make their company accessible to disabled employees.

We want to see accreditation for this scheme being made far more rigorous and, just as importantly, we want disabled employees to be involved in reforming it. 

Neither of these simple first steps would be costly to implement. But the pay off, in terms of transforming disabled people’s career prospects – and wages – would be life-changing. 

And there would be a valuable pay-off for taxpayers too. By halving the disability employment gap, it’s been estimated we would experience a £17bn increase to the treasury every year and an increase of £50m in gross valued added to the economy. 

If the government are truly serious about “getting Britain working”, it’s time to put money on the table to fund these changes and help disabled people break down barriers to equal pay and work.

Harriet Edwards is head of policy at the national disability charity Sense.

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