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From the earliest beginnings of the welfare state, it has been assumed that disabled people would be unlikely to have a job. This assumption was built in to Britain’s national insurance scheme in the 1940s, where „sickness‟ was considered a sufficient explanation for being out of work and claiming benefit, without the further requirement of having to look for work as an “unemployed‟ person. Edward Heath’s government made this distinction even clearer in the early 1970s, establishing Invalidity Benefit, paid at a higher rate than Sickness Benefit or Unemployment Benefit, for people who were judged incapable of work for long periods.

The idea that severely disabled people may be excluded from employment has continued through Incapacity Benefit (established in 1995). The concept of incapacity remains an important component of the current Employment and Support Allowance (introduced in 2008), although the emphasis is now much more focused on identifying people who can work (and should be encouraged to do so) as well on supporting people still judged to be incapable.

The concept of “incapacity‟ implies that some people are unable to work and entitled to special treatment in the social security system, while everyone else is able to work and should expect to take their chances in the labour market. This simple distinction has been subject to two significant modifications over the years.

The first issue is that an individual’s job prospects are not determined simply by his or her own self-contained characteristics, but also by the economic and institutional framework within which employment is negotiated. Whereas the personal or medical model of disability focuses on the constraints on productive activity imposed by a disabled person’s set of impairments (so that they are incapable‟ of work), the social model focuses on the constraints imposed on disabled people’s activities by social care provision, transport networks, and (especially) employment practices which, by failing to adapt to the varying needs and skills in the population, effectively exclude people from the workforce. It is not so much that disabled people are unable to work, as that employers will not offer them a job.

The second issue is that dividing disabled people into two groups – capable and incapable of working - is an oversimplification. In practice there is a wide range of sets of conditions, impairments and severities, which have varying effects on people’s probability of working. These effects vary, too, according to other sets of circumstances – for example, well-educated people are much less vulnerable to the disadvantaging effects of disability than others (with similar impairments) with no qualifications.

This analysis of the trends over three decades has tended to undermine some of the hypotheses frequently put forward to explain the experience of disabled people:

·       -  there is little sign that most of the changes observed over the period have mainly been associated with minor sets of impairments;

·        -  there is little sign that disabled people are especially sensitive to the ups and downs of the business cycle;

·      - although there was a substantial shift in the ratio of disability-disadvantage (as estimated by the survey) to incapacity-related benefit payments (reported by the DWP) up to about 1990, there is little sign that this ratio was influenced by major changes in the rules governing eligibility for benefits. Year-on-year comparisons do not really show what processes are at work.

The research has been more effective at casting doubt on the validity of existing hypotheses than in putting forward and validating a new explanation for the adverse change in disabled people’s employment prospects. It is possible that the main shift has been at the boundary point between social convention and labour market activity.

The same period witnessed a major positive shift in the economic identity of women with children - mothers have increasingly seen themselves as potential workers. It is possible that an opposite trend is affecting disabled people, who increasingly see themselves, and are seen by others, as permanently unable to work – in spite of the new emphasis on disability rights in public discourse. While employers have become more willing to recruit from the large pool of well-qualified women, they have become less motivated to hire or retain people who combine ill-health with low skill levels.

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