Abstract
The Minister for the Disabled was embarrassed on 28 September 1988 by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. It published a report which suggested that there are 6.2 million disabled adults in Britain today, twice as many as previous estimates which were based on a survey carried out in 1969. The new figures are politically embarrassing because of the implications for public spending if the needs of this group are to be met. Peter Townsend, in Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979) had already suggested that the official estimate was about half the correct figure, but his estimate was rubbished on the grounds that his definitions, both of poverty and of disability, were too generous.
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Further Reading
Shearer, A. (1981) Disability; Whose Handicap? (Blackwell).
Davis, F. (1961) ‘Deviance Disavowal’, in H. Becker, The Other Side (Collier-Macmillan Free Press).
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© 1991 David Barrat, Chris Brown, Tony Cole, Peter de la Cour, David Cutler and Karim Murji, Roger Gomm, Patrick McNeill
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McNeill, P. (1991). Handicapping the Disabled. In: Society Today 2. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12065-9_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12065-9_24
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