It needs an employer-side effort, and a government-side effort be that compulsion or tax breaks or DEI-led recruitment.
Overwhelmingly it is easier to stay in work or resume work after disability, if you’re a professional or have a skill. Employers seem to feel it’s worth making adjustments for a professional with in-demand abilities or qualifications.
The end of the employment market that consists of many NMW employees is less keen to accommodate disabilities.
Historically, the disabled would have been left at home to rot, depending on the voluntary efforts of family. Which was a waste of skills and labour, a demand on the army of unpaid women who used to run everything, and generally a relic of the Victorian era.
Everybody needs food, clothing, shelter. You either have a system that enables nearly everybody to earn their own. Or you have a system that makes modest provision for those that can’t (or aren’t allowed to by capitalism).
PIP has absolutely nothing to do with work. It’s paid based on the difficulty level
a disability causes. That’s written into the criteria.
What has happened, though, is that increasingly, the third party, private sector PIP assessors have simultaneously become informally obsessed with the idea that disabled people in work somehow metaphysically aren’t truly disabled. That was the Tory-era effort to cut PIP by just denying people entitlement by incentivising assessors to pick holes.
Similtaneously, as part of a general societal move to vaguely “be aware” of MH, we are now paying more PIP for anxiety, handing out blue badges for anxiety, and now the discovery has apparently been made that a lot of those new additional people are NEETS. WHO knows whether that’s true? I certainly don’t trust political rhetoric and tax payers who are suddenly referring to all disabled people as “shirkers”.