Research on disabled people in the UK, led by the Wolfson Research Institute at Durham University, has found that since the implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), the employment of disabled people has decreased.

The DDA was introduced by the last Conservative government in 1995 and was extended by the Blair administration in 2001 and 2003. A key component of the act was to make it unlawful to "discriminate against disabled persons in connection with employment, the provision of goods, facilities and services, or the disposal or management of premises".

But a recent study, reported in the Guardian, which investigated the employment rates of disabled people in the UK, before and after the implementation of the DDA, found that while the employment rates of non-disabled people increased over the period 1990 to 2003, the employment rates for disabled people decreased by an average of 7%. Although there were no differences between the employment rates of disabled men and women, the Durham-led study found that the employment rates of disabled people from the lowest occupational groups decreased by 11% after the DDA while the employment rates of disabled people in professional occupations did not change significantly during the study period.