The story so far

Our Everyday Equality strategy focuses on supporting disabled people to:

• get the best start in life
• live the lives they choose
• be financially secure

We have set out to:

• put disabled people at the heart of everything we do
• harness digital technology to help us reach many more disabled people
• work with government, businesses and partner organisations to influence attitudes, policies and behaviour on the biggest possible scale
• measure our influence and be accountable for the difference we make
• gather new evidence about disabled people’s lives, which will help us run activities and campaigns

This report tracks progress against our goals. It also shows how much we still have to do over the next 3 years. With your continued support, we will achieve everyday equality, improving the lives of many more disabled people and their families across Britain.

There are 14 million disabled people in the UK (1). That's 1 in 5 of us.

Raising a disabled child

There are over 1 million disabled children in the UK (2).

Disabled families face extra costs of £581 per month (3).

41 per cent of parents of disabled children aged 0 to 5 were not offered any emotional support during the diagnosis journey for their child (4).

Getting and staying in work

There are 7.9 million disabled people of working age in the UK (5).

Only 53 per cent of disabled people are in work. Of the remaining 47 per cent, 1.2 million disabled people want to work, but are being denied the opportunity (6)

For every 100 disabled people who move into a job, 120 disabled people fall out of work (7).

Barriers to independent living

97.8 per cent of homepages of the million most visited websites are inaccessible (8).

Disabled adults face average extra costs of £583 a month (9).

Two-thirds of disabled people have experienced problems using public transport in the last year (10).

Only 23 per cent of disabled people say they feel valued by society (11).

1 in 3 disabled people feels there is still a lot of disability prejudice in Britain today (12).

49 per cent of disabled people say they feel excluded.

We can only bring about everyday equality by reaching more disabled people. Since 2017:

• Over 1.5 million people have accessed our information and advice online
• 95,000 enquiries have been answered through our helpline
• 52,900 disabled and non-disabled people have joined our online community
• 1,824 disabled people have received our voluntary, tailored employment support with an adviser
• Support to Work, our tailored, self-service digital employment support, reached 541,552 disabled people
• 5,200 families have been supported by Scope’s family services
• 40,000 people backed our Now Is The Time campaign, calling on the government to improve policy, services and funding for disabled families

At Scope, we’re driven by the injustice and inequality facing disabled people every day. And we’re all part of a community striving to be Disability Gamechangers.

Since 2017, we’ve enabled:

• 45 social entrepreneurs accessed funding and coaching through Scope and UnLtd, helping to deal with the disability employment gap
• 24 campaigners built their skills through our Scope for Change campaign skills programme
• 66 employers signed our #WorkWithMe pledge, committing to becoming more inclusive workplaces
• Over 700 members joined our disabled people’s research panel

Since 2017:

• 28 per cent of disabled people using our voluntary employment services have moved into work.
• 56 per cent of disabled people who have used Starting Line, our pre-employment programme, are, now in work, education or training.
• 64 per cent of families have reported being more resilient after using Navigate, our online mentoring service for parents and carers

We’ve influenced government, leading to the creation of a new Disability Unit within the Cabinet Office and a forthcoming National Disability Strategy

We spearheaded the introduction of a government-led national disability reporting framework for large employers.

We helped bring about changes in the energy market to drive down the extra costs disabled people face.

1. Family Resources Survey (2016 to 2017)
2. Labour Force Survey (October to December 2018)
3. Office for National Statistics, Table A08: Economic activity of disabled people aged 16 to 64: levels, UK, (July to September 2019)
4. Scope, analysis of the ‘Quarterly Labour Force Survey’ from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) (April to June 2019)
5. The WebAIM Million, An accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages (February 2019)
6. Scope ‘Disability Price Tag’ (2019)
7. Scope, ‘Travel Fair’ (2019)
8. Scope, ‘Independent. Confident. Connected’ (2018)
9. Scope, ‘The Disability Perception Gap’ (2018)
10. Scope, ‘Now is the Time’ (2018)
11. Scope, ‘The Disability Perception Gap’ (2018)
12. Scope, ‘Now is the Time’ (2018)