Of course, this is written from the press release, the full report is not yet published. But you would hope that the engineers can do better than this:
Its report found that almost half of disabled professionals have turned down job opportunities because of transport issues, leaving about 2.8 million people effectively locked out of the workforce, in part because of transport barriers.
Based on the Office for National Statistics’ estimate of an average worker’s annual contribution to economic output of about £63,000, IMechE said helping all of them into a job could add £176.4bn a year to the national economy.
They’ve gone from “a job” to “any job” in one single leap. Their estimate is based upon everyone who has not taken a job not having taken any job.
As I say, the report’s not up yet. So that’ll just have to stand as the analysis – it’s fuckin’ awful analysis there by the engineers.
How much are those little blue three-wheelers…?
Good thing the engineers are building HS2 to reduce those barriers then.
I have also turned down a job opportunity due to transport issues.
It was in London and would have involved tube at rush hour, tried that for the interview and realised I was allergic to armpits.
How many able bodied people have turned down job opportunities because they aren’t prepared to commute into London?
Well at least one……..
Two… (interesting job, as well, editing Jane’s Naval Weapon Systems – but couldn’t make the commute to Croydon work)
Yep – what was the control sample?
I looked at going back to the London rat race a few years ago, but realised that after discounting for costs, commuting expenses and unpaid travel time, I’d be earning less than minimum wage. Better off up in Scotland earning a meagre but also liveable amount. Currently finding £40k in Scotland even with commuting by bus into “Auld Reekie” each day allows me to stash £500 a month or more into savings. Not that this will save me from the ravages of Andy Boredom and Labour, but we’re just marching on the spot until we can eject these Commie barstewards anyway.
How do you put up with the weather and lack of winter light? Apart from SDP madness, they’re what put me off.
In fairness, I work at the Scottish Parliament for a Reform UK MSP, so fighting the SNP madness (rather than that of the SDP) is a part of my paid day-to-day. That and helping constituents with fighting the SNP madness.
As for the weather, if you don’t like rain, don’t live in Scotland, although saying that, the landscape around where I live is really nice, but you can’t exactly eat the scenery, can you.
I’ve told this story before, but one of the reasons for our family moving from Glasgow to Dublin was that it rained less in Ireland!
Glasgow is on the west of an Atlantic landmass and Dublin is on the east of one…
Weather in Edinburgh bad? Just wait ten minutes!
We’re in Scotland and the weather has been shit and I regretted not bringing my hat, gloves and snood one morning. This morning it was high winds and mizzle and we aren’t even in the highlands.
the irony is we changed our plans to avoid the French heatwave.
So, you’re getting what you paid for. No heatwave here in sunny Scotland. Then again that was unlikely to happen regardless.
My consolation is that this tie 3 years ago at this time we were on the west coast of Ireland and the weather was a lot worse.
Anyway, on or way back home, currently just north of Dunfermline, just in time for the next heatwave.
French heatwave was liveable but we did have aircon in the bedroom. Bloody hot days in Bergerac & Sarlat though and we bunked off a couple of things we planned to do.
Sarlat is one of my favourite places in the world, out of season.
I’m sure that it’s much better appreciated out of season. We had to go in June for unrelated reasons.
40deg in a tin box is no fun, even with 2 roof lights and windows at the rear and each side and a good fan. The tin box is quite well insulated so we can use it in winter.
(NB is a Fiat van conversion not a fibre glass build on a standard 3.5t chassis.
I’ve been dithering about aircon in my bedroom for about the last 30 years.
Maybe when I hit the century mark in another 20 years or so???
Should have snuck into the wine caves in Saumur. Constant 12ºC. Then again, so are the fridge aisles in Carrefour.
I’m very tired of this pretence that the disabled are nonetheless the equivalent of the able-bodied in every way.
Quite a few are. I used to do safety boats for a disabled sailing charity and we had some very bright wheelchair bound sailors.
Yes, but they were wheelchair-bound, BiND. Flights of stairs inaccessible to them, unlike those who can walk. Not to diminish them in other ways, but facts are facts.
In offices with lifts, wheelchairs are no problem. Obviously, the disabled can’t deal with, say, refuse collection; but they can do administration, reception, accounts, etc very well.
Better to hire a disabled person than a vibrant…No?
Oh, agreed. I’m merely pointing out why they’re called disabled: it means there are certain things they can’t do at all, or as well as the able bodied, and pretending that they can helps no-one.
It’s rather like those idiotic life coaches insisting that “you can be anything you want to be”. No you can’t. I can’t be an Olympic 100m sprinter or a mountain climber because I don’t have what it takes. I couldn’t be an airline pilot because I couldn’t do the maths and don’t have the personality for such a structured life. To my surprise I could be a good session musician, but no-one ever thought to suggest that to me.
It’s possible to handle a London commute in a wheelchair – increasing numbers of tube stations are wheelchair accessible, and most of the buses. In Paris, OTOH, there’s just one metro line offering wheelchair access, despite them mostly being ‘cut and cover’ unlike the London deep tube lines.
I’m all for new builds having wheel chair accessibility. We shouldn’t let sharp brains go to rot and I’m also with Theo, better the cost of one of our own than the cost of immigrants.
No disagreement there, BiND. I’d certainly use a disabled accountant, lawyer, manager, video editor, retoucher or sound mixer if thy can do the job, but I would be unlikely to use a disabled shoot assistant because they probably couldn’t unless the disability doesn’t interfere. Too much general-purpose physicality involved.
Agreed. And the UK ends up importing labour because so many employers have an irrational dislike of hiring disabled and older people. In my day, I hired some disabled folk – not whingers like the Guardian’s Frances Ryan, but hard workers with a sense of humour, even though they were wheelchair-bound.
Once I covered a maternity leave by hiring an 80+yo book-keeper who walked with sticks: she was efficient, sharp and gave her younger colleagues good tips about Excel.
Of course the disabled are not the equivalent of the able-bodied in *every* way – *but* a disabled professional may be the equal of an able-bodied professional in his/her professional work. My former employer had a lawyer who was blind from birth and very good at his job.
Apparently there are also 5.6m “disabled” “professionals”.
Come on Tim, it’s a Guardian article. How it relates to the original (which you haven’t read) is moot.It’s fucking awful – to use your phrase – to take a Grauniad article at face value.
Yes, that doesn’t mean the original article isn’t shite, but anything that passes through the Guardian is by definition shite.
Disabled people can work from home – if they can work at all.I know some people who do.
I was once extremely pissed off reading about a disabled bloke who once a month spent 5 hours going to be re-assessed for his disability benefit. Sure, it must have been hard for the poor blighter, but I was spending more than twice that on a weekly commute, and thought his moaning about it was out of order. In fact, for 5 hours work a month, his hourly rate was vastly more than mine!
The problem is that “welfare” has just become yet another way of hiding the unemployment figures and a sop to the brothers of Islam.
It is an odd article. You’d think “professionals”, being able to command salaries well above the average, would be capable of sorting out their own transport problems.
Ah! , but! That depends on your definition of a “professional”. There is a Chartered Institute of Secretaries. For a few decades I belonged to three professional bodies (I never managed to get a job as a Statistician but I joined the RSS because I was interested in Statistics). The Grauniad definition of a professional may differ from yours or mine.
The Chartered Institute of Secretaries is for Company Secretaries, the people who run corporate boards and governance. Not for typists.
IMechE: “Give us more work! You’ll make £176.4bn!”
The decimal point is a nice flourish.
The permitting process is too quick and easy. ‘Inclusive design’ should fix that.
An appeal to decadence. The belief that the economy is so robust, you can throw money at hobbies.
That’s a large part of it.
An old railway that is now a country walk runs along the back of my property. A nearby bridge over a road became unsafe and needed replacing. It could simply have been taken out and steps put down to the road: it’s not busy and people can easily cross it. Or the Army could have spent a day putting in a Bailey bridge.
But no. The local authority spent 18 months putting in an (admittedly elegant) architect-designed structure complete with a vast bicycle/wheelchair ramp. This for a country walk which doesn’t lack level access for wheeled vehicles: I can think of at least a dozen places along its 2-mile length.
I’ve heard that this cost well over £10 million with some figures going up to £26 million. The Labour council, bleating about “austerity”, isn’t saying. The potholes don’t get fixed.
2 mile? Have you not found the other stretch yet. Runs from Highgate Wood along the back of Cranley Gardens to Ally Pally.
And if someone’s jemmied the gate again, you can walk through the tunnel to Highgate Station upper level. All just as it was when they closed the railway apart from a bit of vandalism. Platforms, waiting rooms etc..
Sure, but it’s in two bits, and the 2-mile bit with the new bridge has at least a dozen flat access points along its length. I see plenty of people on bikes, but in 27 years have only ever seen one wheelchair, and none since the new bridge went in.
I just looked at the sat view of what was being done. A mighty endeavour!
You’re right about the wheelchairs. In 20 years I don’t suppose I saw more than a couple. It just isn’t suitable for them. Most of it’s under tree cover & leaf-fall, a drop of rain & even cycling’s* a problem. Dogs used come back mud to the eyes.
*And fucking cyclists! Tear the ground to fuck & ruin it for everyone else.
Fixed potholes aren’t something that someone can put his name on. The bridge is.
They’re also not interesting for the cousin/campaign donor/best mate of the parasite dishing out the juicy contracts
They installed a few pedestrian walkways to replace foot crossings on rail lines I used to drive over. One such cost 3 million quid over 15 years ago. Another had to accommodate horses as it was a bridleway! The one recently installed at Weeley church knocks them all into a cocked hat though…..
Remember the old saw… “Economic forecasters only use decimal points to show that they have a sense of humour!”. 🙂
2.8 million is almost half. Estimate half is 3 million, all is 6 million, which sounds like a helluva lot of disabled professionals. Divide by one hundred is still on the limit of credibility.
Depends on your definition of “professional”. A fat pink-haired anxious failure with a grievance studies degree is a “professional”, or would like to be. We have no shortage of them.
That’s getting on for 15% of the working age population.
Perhaps I’m too cynical, but there is a difference between claiming they “turned down job opportunities because of transport issues” and actually turning down job opportunities because of transport issues.
I’ve known people on the dole for various reasons who could always find an excuse to turn down employment.
Once you’ve put in a ramp they’ll find another excuse.
I’m not going to defend the workshy using “disability” as an excuse, but it’s not just a “ramp” though is it. Outside of Londinium, the biggest transport issues tend not to be difficult to get to so much as things like bus services not being available at the time in the morning (especially before 8AM) that would enable the prospective “disabled” employee to actually get to work at a reasonable hour, notwithstanding those on generous motorbility stuff where they get a taxpayer funded car to get about in. For myself, I have to get up at 5:30 AM to catch the 6:20 AM bus into Auld Reekie. Not complaining, because I accepted the job knowing that’s what I would have to do. But even catching a bus at that time only just gets me into work at about 8:20 ish with a reasonable walk at either end amounting to a couple of miles each day. Not sure how a genuinely disabled person would cope with that.
I was chatting with my neighbour’s 21-year-old son a few days ago. He described the latest jobs the JobCentre had recommended for him “only 30 minutes or so away”. Yeah, BY CAR. Being an unemployed 21-year-old without a car BECAUSE HE’S UNEMPLOYED AND CANT AFFORD ONE, a bus would require leaving home at 5am, and then magically finding a bus 90 minutes before the schedule starts.
I’ve turned down work because of the cost of staying a couple of nights away from home is too much, because:
These are all problems caused by the government, that the government could sort out but won’t.
AFAIK a majority of job opportunities are offered to those currently in employment: I am willing to bet the vast majority of job opportunities declined are declined by those already employed.
There is the additional factor that the private sector has been so squeezed for taxes and loaded with additional risks, that who wants the additional bonus of giving a disabled person a chance when there are plenty of not disabled people who carry less, albeit still high, risk. Same applies to hiring old geezers like me. I had health problems back in the day (technically a disability, but I don’t piss-and-moan about it to get free welfare) and nobody would touch me with a 10 foot bargepole until a friend got elected as an MSP and gave me a job running their office.
It’ll get worse with Angie’s new ‘
employeeunion member protection’ laws; employers will have to be incredibly careful about hiring anyone, because it’ll cost them a fortune to get rid of them.My so has responsibility for a village shop on ann estate not far from you, although not the day to day running. All the staff are on zero hours contracts to provide flexibility on both sides. They now have to sign a new contract every year to say they are happy with zero hours and he’s not sure what to do if any of them say no.
He’s also just calculated all extra costs that Labour has imposed and his margins are now less than 2% and if they have a bad few weeks they’ll struggle with payroll.
Hmmm….. I have two friends in The Lords. Wonder if they have constituency offices. Don’t fancy commuting to The Smoke.
Sadly, Lords do not have a staffing allowance. They don’t even have an office in P, let alone staff. I know this as when I had a Lord’s pass, and was nominally working for a peer to get that, I was actually being paid by the EU.
It’s amazing that when you read between the lines almost all job vacancies require you to be already working at the employer to qualify.
Ok, you could call me a “disabled professional”. Last year I resigned from a job doing POS equiment replacements in post offices COUGHhorizonCOUGH because 90% of the job was lifting, carrying, crawling, holding your body at weird angles, etc. etc. etc. It was leaving me actually crippled by the end of the day.
Since then I have refused to apply for similar jobs that upon reading the description of “IT Engineer” turn out to again be fucking furniture removal. It’s not the transport, it’s the actual job.
It turns out we get old and knackered, which is a form of disability compared to the hale in the prime of their lives. Eventually we become so disabled we peg. So be it.
The whole point of these reports is to get the biggest number possible. They get away with insane assumptions because the media won’t ask questions, not that the journos can add up to begin with.
The nuber of disabled people who turn down jobs is only interesting in comparison with the number of non-disabled who do the same,
What are “transport issues”? Most people living in the UK today would turn down a job that is too far away, whatever that means to them – an hour commute, the opposite end of the country, In Belgium, Syria, China, at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, in orbit, etc.
And what is a disability? Does needing glasses count? A hearing aid? A walking stick?
Charles: “And what is a disability”?
Absolutely anything you can think of which will ensure you get preferential treatment.