Industry News | Aug 14, 2026 | No Comments |
Disability Foresight Research
New Foresight Research Maps Three Possible Futures for Disabled People
The Cabinet Office Disability Unit has published new foresight research examining what life could look like for disabled people in the UK over the next five, ten and twenty years. The research, carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) and published in March, combines a review of existing evidence with in-depth engagement with disabled people themselves.
Commissioned in January 2025, the Disability Foresight Research project set out to understand both the trends already shaping disabled people’s lives and the futures disabled people would most want to see. NatCen’s approach combined a scoping review of UK statistics and academic literature across social, technological, economic, environmental, political and values-based domains, a workshop with six government policy-makers, and interviews and world-building workshops with twelve Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The most notable result was not any single statistic, but the gap between the two halves of the exercise. The evidence review painted a largely negative picture of the years ahead. Yet when DPOs were given room to imagine the future for themselves, they built three deliberately hopeful scenarios, and told researchers that “aspirational futures helped DPOs articulate how they can make change.”
At a glance: three future worlds
A world with no climate change and a high standard of living.
Universal basic income, expanded NHS services and reversed climate impacts, with green infrastructure redesigned to improve accessibility and reduce isolation. DPOs voted this the world they most wanted to build.
An equitable world with a high cost of living.
Despite continued economic hardship, disabled people are protected from disproportionate impact by mandatory disability education, from childhood through employment, and strong, consistent legislation.
An AI-assisted world with full employment.
A well-funded Access to Work scheme tailored to individual needs, AI-driven recruitment designed to eliminate rather than entrench human bias, and government leading by example through the Department for Work and Pensions.
The evidence: a mixed picture
The scoping review’s findings help explain why the DPOs’ optimism struck researchers as so significant. Reported disability prevalence has risen sharply among younger people: among 16 to 24 year-olds it has more than doubled, from 8% to 17%, with a comparable rise among 25 to 34 year-olds, from 11% to 18%. An ageing population is adding further pressure to health and social care systems, and mental health conditions are increasing among both children and working-age adults.
Several DPOs raised a further concern that went beyond statistics: that social attitudes towards disabled people were, if anything, moving backwards, becoming more exclusionary than they were ten or twenty years ago. On technology, the report flags a familiar tension. Emerging tools, particularly AI-driven recruitment systems, risk rejecting disabled applicants if they are not designed and tested with disabled people in mind, and disabled people remain underrepresented in the conversations shaping how AI is developed and regulated.
What needs to change
Across the workshops, DPOs converged on a similar set of conditions for turning the bleaker evidence into something closer to their imagined futures. Chief among them was full enforcement of the Equality Act 2010, which participants felt exists on paper more than it operates in practice, alongside wider adoption of the social model of disability across government departments and public bodies. Greater disabled representation in elected office and public institutions featured prominently, as did a call for policy-making that treats disabled people’s lived experience as evidence in its own right, rather than as consultation after decisions have effectively been made.
The private sector was seen as capable of driving real progress, particularly in assistive technology and employment, but DPOs were clear-eyed that profit motive alone cannot be relied upon to protect disabled people’s rights. Several groups argued for stronger government regulation to sit alongside private sector innovation, including, in one case, a proposal for an independent body to regulate the use of AI.
A note on scale
The research is based on the views of twelve DPOs, purposively sampled for a range of impairments and UK regions, rather than a representative survey of disabled people as a whole. NatCen also acknowledged that the sources used in its scoping review skewed towards negative findings, which may have sharpened the contrast with the DPOs’ own, more hopeful, vision of the future. The report itself frames these findings as a starting point for further engagement, including with the third sector, and recommends similar work in healthcare, education and housing.
Independent Living comment
What stands out from this report is not the futures it describes, but the fact that disabled people were prepared to describe them at all. Given a bleak evidence base and a policy landscape that many DPOs feel has left legislation unenforced and attitudes drifting backwards, choosing to spend workshop time designing a world with universal basic income and bias-free recruitment is, in itself, a statement of intent.
Government foresight exercises like this one rarely commit to anything. Their value lies in whether the conditions DPOs identified, from Equality Act enforcement to lived experience shaping policy from the outset, find their way into departments’ actual planning. Twelve organisations cannot speak for every disabled person in the UK, and the report is honest about that limit. But it offers something more useful than another dataset: a reasonably specific account, from the people most affected, of what would need to be true for the next twenty years to look better than the last ten.
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Further reading and resources
You can download the full report here (external link will open in a new browser tab or window)
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