Ministers like to refer it as the “disability employment gap”. It’s the difference between the employment rate for those with disabilities and those without – it currently stands at 32 per cent.

Describing that as a “gap” goes beyond understatement. It’s more a case of using bland or friendly terminology to hide an uncomfortable truth, like calling radiation “magic moonbeams”.

A better adjective might be “chasm” or “canyon” or, in fact, “gulf”. Let’s go with chasm for now. I like the sound of that one.

Now the Government has been banging on for ages about halving it to a level at which you might, at a pinch, just about be able to use the word “gap” to describe it. Back in the days of the Coalition, a target of 2020 was set for achieving that aim. Unfortunately, as a report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Disability points out, progress has been about as fast as I was on the day my sports wheelchair blew a tyre out.

Dispatches: Assessor dismisses claimant's disability as being "fat"

As things stand, just 48 per cent of people with disabilities are in employment. The chasm between that and the employment rate of their non-disabled peers has narrowed over the last four years, by all of a single percentage point. If it continues to close at its current rate, the Government target won’t be reached until 2065.

And that’s a big if. The labour market has been throwing off lots of jobs recently. High levels of employment in the population at large has led to shortages in certain parts of the economy. Opportunities therefore ought to have opened up for people with disabilities. And yet the chasm is barely narrower than it was when the coalition took office back in 2010.

Now, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility thinks that half a million new jobs will be created between 2016 and 2020. I personally think that forecast is on the optimistic side, but let’s assume it is right. The disability employment rate would reach 56 per cent and the chasm would narrow to 24 per cent – only if every one of those new roles went to a person with a disability.

If the Government is to actually meet its manifesto commitment and improve the disability employment rate to 64 per cent, it will need to move nearly 1.1million disabled people into work in just four years.

“Economic growth alone will not deliver the Government’s manifesto commitment to halve the disability employment gap even on the most favourable (and unrealistic) assumptions,” the report concluded. No kidding.

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Show all 7 1 /7 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Closing Remploy factories The Work and Pensions Secretary called time on Britain’s system of Remploy factories, which provided subsidised and sheltered employment to disabled people. People employed at the factories protested against their closure and said they provided gainful work. “Is it a kindness to stick people in some factory where they are not doing any work at all? Just making cups of coffee?” Mr Duncan Smith said at the time, defending the decision. “I promise you this is better.” The Remploy organisation was privatised and sold to American workfare provider Maximus, with the majority of the organisation’s factories closed. The future of the remaining sites is unclear 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Scrapping the Independent Living Fund The £320m Independent Living Fund was established in 1988 to give financial support to people with disabilities. It was scrapped on July 1 2015, with 18,000 often severely disabled people losing out by an average of £300 a week. The money was generally used to help pay for carers so people could live in communities rather than institutions. Councils will get a boost in funding to compensate but it will not cover the whole cost of the fund. This new cash also doesn’t have to be spent on the disabled 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Cut payments for the disabled Access To Work scheme Iain Duncan Smith is bringing forward a policy that will reduce payments to some disabled people from a scheme designed to help them into work. The £108m scheme, which helps 35,540 people, will be capped on a per-used basis, potentially hitting those with the more serious disabilities who currently receive the most help. The single biggest users of the fund are people who have difficulty seeing and hearing. The cut will come in from October 2015. The charity Disability UK says the scheme actually makes the Government money because the people who gain access to work tend pay tax that more than covers its cost. The DWP does not describe the reduction as a “cut” and says it will be able to spread the money more thinly and cover more people 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Cut Employment and Support Allowance The latest Budget included a £30 a week cut in disability benefits for some new claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The Government says it is equalising the rate of disability benefits with Jobseekers Allowance because giving disabled people more help is a “perverse incentive”. The people affected by this cut are those assessed as having a limited capability for work but as being capable of some “work-related activity”. A group of prominent Catholics wrote to Mr Duncan Smith to say there was “no justification” for this cut. Mental health charity Mind, said the cut was “insulting and misguided” 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Risk homelessness with a sharp increase disability benefit sanctions Official figures in the first quarter of 2014 found a huge increase in sanctions against people reliant on ESA sickness benefit. The 15,955 sanctions were handed out in that period compared to 3,574 in the same period the year before, 2013 – a 4.5 times increase. The homelessness charity Crisis warned at the time that the sharp rise in temporary benefit cuts was “cruel and can leave people utterly destitute – without money even for food and at severe risk of homelessness”. “It is difficult to see how they are meant to help people prepare for work,” Matt Downie, director of policy at the charity added 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Sending sick people to work because of broken fitness to work tests In 2012 a government advisor appointed to review the Government’s Work Capability Assessment said the tests causing suffering by sending sick people back to work inappropriately. “There are certainly areas where it's still not working and I am sorry there are people going through a system which I think still needs improvement,” Professor Malcolm Harrington concluded. The tests are said to have improved since then, but as recently as this summer they are still coming in for criticism. In June the British Psychological Society said there was “now significant body of evidence that the WCA is failing to assess people’s fitness for work accurately and appropriately”. It called for a full overhaul of the way the tests are carried out. The WCA appeals system has also been fraught with controversy with a very high rate of overturns and delays lasting months and blamed for hardship 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people The bedroom tax The Government’s benefit cut for people who it says are “under-occupying” their homes disproportionately affects disabled people. Statistics released last year show that around two-thirds of those affected by the under-occupancy penalty, widely known as the ‘bedroom tax’, are disabled. There have been a number of high profile cases of disabled people being moved out of specially adapted homes by the policy. In one case publicised by the Sunday People last week, a 48 year old man with cerebral palsy was forced to bathe in a paddling pool after the tax moved him out of his home with a walk-in shower. The Government says it has provided councils with a discretionary fund to help reduce the policy’s impact on disabled people, but cases continue to arise

But the Government is on the case, right? Surely it’s doing something? Because we all know that manifesto commitments are terribly important. Prime Minister Theresa May keeps talking about delivery after all.

Well, no. At least not in this case.

For the record, the Department for Work & Pensions spends around £350m a year on back to work support for disabled people. Oh and there’s something called the “Disability Confident” employer scheme, which tends to provoke bitter laughter from those in the disability lobby when you get them down the pub.

Meanwhile benefits like the Employment & Support allowance have been cut and the report found that important government bodies such as Innovate UK and the Business Bank (both of which play a key role in job growth) “do not record or monitor the uptake of their support by disability status. Consequently, they do not know the extent to which (if any) their support is of value or use to disabled people”.

There is an adjective I could use to describe that. Just not one I’d use in polite company.

But there’s more: “The Inquiry collected evidence of both public and private sector organisations failing to provide appropriate support to disabled people in the workplace and in access to start up funds, business advice and business networks on a scale which we suggest amounts to ‘institutional disablism’.”

See my above point about four letter adjectives that I really, really want to use when I read reports like this.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Government has multiple levers which it could pull with the aim of improving this sorry situation. As the report notes, it spent £242bn on the purchase of goods and services in the last financial year.

So, quite apart from its ability to legislate, it has enormous economic clout. Were it to, for example, require contractors to enact inclusive recruitment and retention policies they would have little choice but to do so. Were it to monitor this, and insist on the requirement extending down the supply chain, it is possible to foresee relatively rapid progress being made.

It could require the same sort of things of public sector employers. It could link securing improvements to funding.

Given the size of the current chasm it may also require disabled people to be given, yes, preferential treatment. But as the report notes, this is “the sort of positive action that equalities legislation makes possible”.

And there’s more besides. What is really lacking on the part of the ministers is the will to do anything at all.

The report refers to what has become one of Prime Minister Theresa May’s signature phrases: “a country that works for the many not just the few”. At the moment, the Government’s policy towards disabled people really necessitates an asterisk being added to that along with the legend “except for disabled people because we don’t much care about them”.