According to a TUC report published today, disabled workers in the UK are facing a double whammy of discrimination in the labour market.

Our research shows that the disability pay gap now stands at 15 per cent – a shocking £2,730 a year for someone working 35 hours a week.

That's the highest since the government began publishing comparable data in 2012-13.

We also found that disabled people are significantly less likely to be in work than non-disabled workers.

According to our analysis, the number of disabled people in work has increased by almost 600,000 since 2013, but their unemployment rate is still over 50 per cent higher than it is for non-disabled peers.

As the second day of the TUC Disabled Workers Conference gets underway, we’re calling on the government to get serious about tackling this problem.

We want ministers to reverse cuts to disability benefits and consult on whether employers should have to publish their disability pay gap.

And the government must start working with trade unions and disabled people themselves so we can end the shameful discrimination against disabled workers in this country.

What do the figures show?

Put simply, the numbers show that pay disparity for disabled people has persisted for decades.

The chart below shows the disability pay gap as a percentage of the average disabled person’s income.

A change in the classification used to report disabilities means we can’t make direct comparisons with earlier data, but the Equality and Human Rights Commission calculates the gap was 13 per cent for men and 7 per cent for women from 1997 to 2014.

Our analysis finds a very similar average from 2013 to 2017 (13.7 per cent for men and 7.7 per cent for women). In other words, very little has changed over the last 20 years.