Paid employment and people with learning disabilities in England: what do the statistics tell us?

This blogpost updates previous posts on what the statistics say about the self/paid employment of working age (aged 18-64 years old) adults with learning disabilities in England. These figures are provided by local authorities every year, and since 2014/15 have only been provided for people getting long-term social care (before 2014/15 it was the larger group of people known to local authorities as a person with learning disabilities, even if they weren't getting long-term social care support). This means that these figures don't include the much, much larger group of adults with learning disabilities who aren't known to local authorities or GPs and who don't get any kind of support related to their learning disability.

Some of the numbers reported here are included in the NHS Digital Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework (indicator 1E, if you're interested), although some of the numbers are more buried in publicly available but less accessible datafiles. 

What do the numbers tell us?

The first graph below shows the number of working age adults with learning disabilities that councils say are in any self/paid employment, broken down by whether people are in employment for 16+ hours per week or less than 16 hours per week (and 1 hour a week can count in these statistics). The gap between 2013/14 and 2014/15 is because of the change in data collection I mentioned earlier, so numbers before and after then can't be compared, and 2008/2009 was the first year that information was collected so it's rather dodgy for that year.

According to these figures, in 2017/18 there were 7,907 working age adults with learning disabilities getting long-term social care in any form of self/paid employment. Overall, this looks like it might be a slight increase from around 7,400-7,500 people in the previous three years. Consistent across the years is that most of the people in employment (68% of people in 2017/18) are working for less than 16 hours per week.

What do these numbers mean in terms of employment rates? The graph below shows the employment rates for working age adults with learning disabilities over the same  time period. The columns show the overall employment rate - in 2017/18 this was 6.0%, compared to around 75% for adults generally. From 2014/15 to 2017/18 the overall employment rate for working age adults with learning disabilities has stayed pretty static at or just under 6%.

The lines on the graph show employment rates for men and women with learning disabilities separately. Employment rates for men (the purple line) are consistently higher (6.6% in 2017/18) than employment rates for women (the blue line) (5.2% in 2017/18), with some tentative signs that this gender employment gap is increasing.

Employment rates are also very different across regions, as you can see in the next graph below which shows employment rates for different regions from 2014/15 to 2017/18. The highest employment rates for working age adults with learning disabilities reported by councils were in the London (7.5%), Eastern (7.5%) and Yorkshire & Humber (7.4%) regions. The lowest employment rates were in the North West, East Midlands and West Midlands (all 4.3%).

At an individual council level these differences in employment rates are even bigger, ranging from virtually 0% to over 20%, as the graph below shows.

The last graph below sounds an appropriate note of caution about the reliability of information on self-paid employment provided by councils. This shows, for all working age adult with learning disabilities getting long-term social care, whether councils say they are: 1) in self-paid employment; 2) not in employment but actively seeking work (and presumably therefore liable to potential benefit sanctions); 3) not in employment but not actively seeking work. There is also a fourth category, where councils say they don't know the employment status of the person.

Over time, the number of people whose employment status is unknown has decreased rapidly, from 44% of working age adults with learning disabilities in 2014/15 to 28% of people in 2017/18 (28% is still a big chunk, however). This might also account for some of the apparent increase in the number of people employed in 2017/18, which might partly be because councils simply know about more people. It is unclear how councils are making decisions about whether to record someone as actively seeking work or not.

Overall, this update shows little apparent change in the self/paid employment of working age adults with learning disabilities getting long-term social care, with most work being extremely part-time, a gender employment gap and big differences in employment rates across areas.