Introduction

Experts, politicians and the public are all in agreement: there is a problem with the employment of disabled people in Britain. Over a period in which life expectancy rose, the rates of sickness benefit claims increased at the same time – such that before the recent recession there were three times as many people claiming sickness benefits as unemployment benefits. This rise in sickness benefit receipt requires explanation as well as urgent intervention.

In the academic literature, there is a rough consensus over the nature of this problem, much of which stems from an influential publication in the British Medical Journal in 1996 (Bartley and Owen, 1996). In this paper, Mel Bartley and Charlie Owen made two observations. First, the level of disability in the British population appeared to have stayed flat over the period 1973-93. Second, the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people increased substantially over this time. ‘The problem’ therefore seemed not to be one of increasing levels of disability, but rather one of changing levels of labour demand for disabled people. This analysis has not only been influential in itself, but has also been replicated and updated several times (Bartley et al, 2004; Bell and Smith, 2004; Faggio and Nickell, 2005; Berthoud, 2011).

This chapter aims to show that the Bartley-Owen interpretation is partial at best, and that another explanation is possible, one that is bound up in the changing nature of work in Britain. The evidence for this is based on a superficially minor distinction about what we mean by ‘disability’. All of this previous work has looked at general measures of disability. Yet if we instead look at ‘work-limiting’ disability – which reflects the combination of health and working conditions – we get precisely the opposite results to the established consensus. That is, the problem is not that employment rates among disabled people have been declining (which is what we see when we look at conventional measures of disability). Rather, the problem is an increasing level of worklimiting disability per se – a problem that is likely to be explained by how work has evolved over the past three decades.