EU efforts to improve the lives of disabled people have seen little success in recent years, with them still struggling to find work and fight poverty, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) has found.
An ECA report published on Thursday (12 October) found that the EU’s strategy for people with disabilities, which has been in place for almost two decades, has not led to any improvements on the ground in terms of workforce participation or poverty rates.
“The EU measures had limited practical impact,” Steph Block, the ECA member in charge of the audit, said at a press conference on Thursday.
Over the past decade, auditors have found that there has been little or no progress in improving opportunities for disabled people to play an equal role in everyday life in key areas.
This affects about a quarter of EU citizens over the age of 16 who self-identify as having a disability, whether physical or mental, which means about 87 million people – a number that is likely to grow given the ageing of the EU population.
According to Eurostat, the disability employment gap in 2021 is roughly the same as it was in 2014, when records began, with only half of the disabled population having a job compared to 75% of non-disabled people.
In 2021, disabled people had a 30% higher risk of poverty or social exclusion than non-disabled people (19%), a risk that has not changed significantly since 2015.
“People with disabilities in the EU continue to face uphill struggles in getting jobs, fighting poverty and even barriers to their freedom of movement,” Blok said.
The EU’s work on persons with disabilities dates back to 1997, when the Treaty of Amsterdam first included an anti-discrimination clause.
The current Disability Rights Strategy 2021-2030 was adopted in March 2021. According to a European Commission press release, the strategy aims to ensure that people with disabilities can “fully participate in society, on an equal basis with others in the EU.”
In its current strategy, the auditors said, the Commission has addressed most of its previous shortcomings and has proposed several key inclusion initiatives, such as a European Disability Card and a disability employment package, both of which are steps in the right direction. But “several issues remain unresolved,” Blok said.
He stressed that while social policy under EU treaties, including disability policy, is a national competence, “the EU has a clear role to play and the European Commission has the will and enthusiasm to implement it.”
Lack of data and oversight
So what went wrong on the committee’s part?
“A review to assess compliance with important EU legislation has yet to take place. [UN] “Progress on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and related legislation has been stalled,” Block said.
Progress in this area has been hampered by stalled EU equal treatment directives and slow progress by member states in transposing European accessibility legislation into national law.
The link with EU funding also remains weak, with the European Commission not tracking how much EU money is actually spent to support people with disabilities, which might indicate how much EU funding has improved their situation.
“we, [Commission’s] “The design of the monitoring framework does not provide the information to conclude that EU funding has helped to improve the situation of people with disabilities,” Blok said.
Another shortcoming noted by the auditors is the lack of data and accurate reflection of people with disabilities across the EU.
“We have seen that the EU statistics have shortcomings in terms of frequency of coverage and level of detail,” Blok stressed, adding that the Commission should get more comparable data.
The lack of data is felt when trying to assess the Commission’s commitment, outlined in the strategy, to lead by example when it comes to the employment of people with disabilities and to call on other EU institutions to do the same.
“We have looked at the Parliament, the Council, the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Auditors as implementers of this commitment and request. But so far the available data does not allow us to assess whether the EU institutions have achieved their goals,” Blok said.
The situation varies from member state to member state
Auditors also carried out audit checks in four Member States: Spain, the Netherlands, Romania and Sweden.
According to an ECA press release, it was found that member states offer very different support and benefits to people with disabilities and have different methods for determining who is eligible.
“We looked at disability-related spending as a percentage of GDP in 2020, but because the criteria for granting disability status differed between Member States, we were not able to match national data based on surveys in which participants declared their disability status with EU-level data,” Blok stressed.
National government spending on social security benefits for people with disabilities averages just over 2% of GDP, ranging from less than 1% in Malta to 5% in Denmark.
“The countries that spend the most spend five times more than the countries that spend the least. This is about national capacity, and the gaps are so large that it’s clear that even if we wanted to overcome these gaps, it would not be easy to do so,” Blok stressed.
Reacting to the report, Yannis Vardakastanis, president of the European Forum for People with Disabilities, criticised member states’ actions.
“In our view, EU countries bear much of the responsibility for the limited impact of EU action by watering down legislation and, as the report points out, delaying implementation,” he stressed in a press release.
“There needs to be closer scrutiny of EU action in all areas, including the development of policies and legislation, funding for disability support activities and ensuring that proposed policies are actually implemented by member states,” he added.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
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