Whether or not someone is capable of work is not simply a matter for assessment argues Andy Rickell. The government needs to recognise and address the barriers to employment many disabled people face and provide the right support.
In a number of meetings with Ministers over the years, I have made the rather odd statement that the problem for disabled people has been that government has traditionally regarded us as “owned” by the Department for Health, and we need instead to at least be “owned” by the Department for Work and Pensions, if not ideally by the whole of government.
It was a shorthand way of saying that disabled people have been wrongly seen as an unproductive liability burdening the public purse (medical model thinking). But instead, we should be regarded as a productive asset worthy of public investment, like non-disabled people (social model thinking). In a sense, government thinking had been in spite of the evidence, because the government’s own statistics show that all but nine per cent of disabled people of working age have worked at some point, but only 46 per cent of us are currently in work – we are indeed an under-used asset rather than a liability.
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