"This article describes recent trends in the number and proportion of disabled people working in the public sector in Britain between 1998 and 2004. It shows that the rate of public sector employment growth for disabled people was four times the growth rate for their non-disabled counterparts. The bulk of the job gains were in education and health, and the growth in employment of disabled people in both areas outstripped that of non-disabled people. As a proportion of the working age population however, disabled people were less likely than non-disabled people to be working in the public sector, reflecting widespread and long-standing differences in the extent to which disabled people take up or stay in paid employment. In 2004, around 12 per cent of disabled people had public sector jobs compared with around 19 per cent of non-disabled people, an employment gap of 7 percentage points. Moreover, the gap in public sector employment rates between disabled and non-disabled people has not narrowed in the six years to 2004. Thus, the extent to which disabled people work in the public sector relative to non-disabled people shows no consistent tendency to increase or decrease across the study period. The article investigates this further, describing variations in disabled people's public sector employment by age, gender, ethnicity and main health problem or disability. The analysis is based on data from the Labour Force Survey."

Support: Paper