The evidence behind what we say in Beyond Extraordinary: Who Are You Missing? book

Beyond Extraordinary: Who Are You Missing? makes claims about the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. How many there are. How many are invisible to the services meant to support them. How much shorter their lives are. And what happens to them in education and in work.

We start with the global figures, because this is not a UK problem with a single cause. It happens everywhere it is looked for. Then we narrow to the United Kingdom, where the record is fullest and where we have lived it ourselves.

None of these findings are ours. Every one comes from a published source you can check: the Government’s own auditors, inspectors, select committees and statisticians, the United Nations, peer-reviewed research, national charities and investigative journalists. We have gathered the evidence here for anyone who wants to check the truth, or who needs it for a meeting, a tribunal, an article or an argument.

For each source we have said who wrote it, when, what it found, and where to read it in full.

Some of it is hard reading. All of it is checkable. That matters to us, because the parallel universe we describe in the book is not a metaphor — it is funded, it is measured, and it is published. Yet it is still unseen by the majority of society.

Start here: who this page is about

We use the term intellectual disability, the internationally recognised equivalent of what we know in the UK as learning disability. Where a register, a report title, an Act or a direct quotation uses the words “learning disability”, we have kept them, because that is their name and we are not in the business of altering the record.

A word on geography too. Education, health and social care are devolved, so the four nations which make up the United Kingdom count separately and nobody seems to add them up — there is no single UK-wide picture for most of this. We have said under every source which nation it covers. Most say England, and that is not us being careless. It is the only statistic we can find.

Almost every figure on this page describes people with an intellectual disability. Percentages are of that group, not of the whole population, unless we say otherwise. Before you read any of them, four numbers put the rest in proportion.

• Somewhere between 1% and 3% of the world’s population has an intellectual disability — between about 80 and 250 million people.
• 1.5 million of them live in the UK. That is about one person in every 46, roughly two in every hundred. Not rare. Not unusual. There are some in your street.
• In England, around 350,000 people aged 14 and over are on a GP learning disability register. The estimate for England is 1.3 million. So the health service is seeing only between one in four and one in three of the people it is supposed to be looking at.
• Everything else on this page — the taxis, the placements, the hospital beds, the missing years of life — happens to this section of the population. When you read “39% of deaths”, it means 39 out of every 100 deaths of people with an intellectual disability.

That gap between 1.3 million and 350,000 is the parallel universe. Most of these people are not hidden because they are hiding. They are hidden because nobody is counting them.

1. The world we are part of

Before any of the UK figures, let’s look at the global scale. Everything that follows in any country has an international counterpart, and where the comparison can be made the numbers are uncomfortably similar. The UK is not an outlier — which means whatever is causing this, it is not peculiar to us.

A note on who these figures cover. The international data is almost all about disability as a whole — physical, sensory, intellectual and psychosocial together. Very little of it separates out intellectual disability, so we have said for each figure below which population it describes. That absence is not a quirk of statistics. It is the first sign of what this page is about: if you are not counted, you cannot be missed.

How many worldwide — and why the answer is a range

Maulik and others, Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2011; World Health Organization, 2023 — global

Global figures for intellectual disability are quoted confidently and often, usually attributed to the World Health Organization. The honest position is that the range is wide, so we set out what each source actually says:

• The most-cited peer-reviewed estimate comes from a meta-analysis of 52 population studies: 10.37 per 1,000 people, or roughly 1%. Prevalence was higher in low- and middle-income countries, and higher in studies of children than of adults.
• The World Health Organization’s own disability fact sheet (7 March 2023) states that 1.3 billion people — 16% of the world, one in six — experience significant disability. It gives no separate figure for intellectual disability at all.
• Special Olympics attributes to the WHO the claim that “up to three percent — nearly 200 million people — of the world’s population have intellectual disabilities”, but does not name the WHO document it comes from.
• Taken together: credible estimates run from about 1% to about 3% of the world’s population, depending on how intellectual disability is defined and measured. Any single figure quoted as the WHO’s should be treated with care.

What that means: Between 1% and 3% of everybody alive, somewhere between 80 and 250 million people, live with an intellectual disability. The UK figure in the next section, 1.5 million people, works out at about 2.2% of the population.

Read it in full: Maulik and others, Prevalence of intellectual disability (2011)
The WHO position: who.int — Disability fact sheet
The widely quoted version: specialolympics.org — Intellectual Disability fact sheet (PDF)

World Health Organization — Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities

World Health Organization, 2 December 2022 — covers all disability

The most authoritative global picture there is.

• 1.3 billion people — 16% of the world, one in six of us — experience significant disability.
• They die up to 20 years earlier than people without disabilities.
• They face up to double the risk of asthma, depression, diabetes, obesity, oral disease and stroke.
• Around 80% of them live in low- and middle-income countries.

What that means: The World Health Organization puts the global gap at up to 20 years. The UK’s own mortality review puts the gap here at 19. One of the richest countries on earth, with a health service free at the point of use, produces roughly the world average. Whatever is causing this, wealth and universal healthcare are not changing it.

Read it in full: who.int — Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities
The headline findings: who.int — the summary figures

UNICEF — Seen, Counted, Included

UNICEF, November 2021 — covers all disability, children only

The most comprehensive statistical analysis of children with disabilities ever attempted, drawing on data from 42 countries and more than 60 measures of wellbeing.

• Almost 240 million children worldwide have a disability — about one child in ten.
• They are 49% more likely never to have attended school.
• They are 42% less likely to have foundational reading and numeracy skills.
• They are 51% more likely to feel unhappy, and 41% more likely to feel discriminated against.

What that means: The schooling figure is hard to sit with: a child with a disability is about one and a half times as likely never to have been to school at all. In section 5, the UK version appears — a child taxied 200 miles to a school rather than kept from one. Different mechanism, same result: a childhood spent outside the ordinary life of a community.

Read it in full: data.unicef.org — Seen, Counted, Included

International Labour Organization — work

International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT — covers all disability

The global picture on work.

• Only about one in three people with disabilities is employed.
• They are two times less likely to be employed than people without disabilities.
• Almost two thirds of working-age disabled people are outside the labour force altogether — not unemployed, but not counted as looking either.

What that means: One in three worldwide. The UK does better on that measure — 53% of all disabled people here are in work.

Read it in full: ilostat.ilo.org — how disability affects labour market outcomes

2. How many people are we talking about?

Now the United Kingdom, where the record is fullest and where we have lived it. This is the size of the population society has decided not to look at, and the size of the gap between how many there are and how many are known.

Mencap — How common is learning disability?

Mencap, drawing on Public Health England (2016) and the Office for National Statistics, ONS (2024) — UK

The standard UK figure comes from Mencap. They combine the last full Public Health England prevalence study with current ONS population estimates:

• 1.5 million people with an intellectual disability in the UK.
• 1.2 million of them are adults.
• 349,000 of them are children.
• 1.3 million of the UK total live in England.
• Underlying sources: Public Health England, People with Learning Disabilities in England 2015 (published 2016), applied to ONS mid-2022 population estimates (published 2024).

What that means: 1.5 million out of a UK population of 69.3 million is about one person in every 46. Put another way, a town of 5,000 people contains roughly 110 of them. Most people believe they have never met anyone with an intellectual disability. Statistically, almost everyone has.

Read it in full: mencap.org.uk — How common is learning disability?

NHS England and the British Journal of General Practice — who is actually on a register

NHS England Digital, July 2026 data published 10 September 2026; British Journal of General Practice, 11 August 2026 — England

Mencap’s figure is an estimate of how many people there are. This is the NHS’s own count of how many it knows about. Put the two side by side and you have an argument of the parallel universe.

• Around 350,000 people aged 14 and over in England are on a GP learning disability register — the list that entitles someone to an annual health check.
• A 2026 study of NHS data from January 2022 to November 2025 found registers stand at between one quarter and one third of what prevalence estimates predict.
• The same study puts national prevalence estimates at 1.5% to 2% of the population.
• Numbers on registers are rising — up 14.5% for adults and 30.5% for 14 to 17 year olds over that period — but the gap remains.

What that means: Of an estimated 1.3 million people with an intellectual disability in England, about 350,000 aged 14 and over are known to their GP as having one. Allowing for the younger children the registers do not count, that is between a quarter and a third of the people who should be there. At least two in every three are missing. This is the single clearest measure of the parallel universe.

Read it in full: digital.nhs.uk — Learning Disabilities Health Check Scheme
The study: bjgp.org — learning disability register enrolment

Professor Chris Hatton — the hidden majority

Prof. Chris Hatton, Public Health England, 4 October 2016 — England

And none of this is new. Ten years before those register figures, a Public Health England researcher put a number on the people the system had never met. It is an important figure that almost nobody quotes:

• Around 700,000 adults in England were identified in childhood as having an intellectual disability but are not identified as such by adult health or social care services.
• Hatton’s finding is that the health inequalities this group faces are largely explained by poverty and social conditions rather than by intellectual disability itself.
• The analysis came from the Understanding Society survey of more than 20,000 adults aged 16 to 49.

A note on wording: Hatton describes these adults as “not known to services”. That is not quite the same as saying their disability is not severe enough to qualify for support — the first is about visibility, the second about eligibility. Both are true of this group, but only the first is what this source establishes.

What that means: 700,000 adults, out of roughly a million adults with an intellectual disability in England. That is why Hatton calls it a majority and not a minority. These are not people on a waiting list. They are people no service has ever counted — and he said so in 2016. A decade later the registers are growing, but they still cover only a quarter to a third of the people they should.

Read it in full: ukhsa.blog.gov.uk — Health inequalities and the ‘hidden majority’

3. How much shorter their lives are

This is the number that should stop the conversation. It is published every year, by the NHS, and it has been known for two decades.

LeDeR — Learning from Lives and Deaths

King’s College London, University of Lancashire and Kingston University, commissioned by NHS England — 2024 national report, published 13 July 2026 — England

The national mortality review for people with an intellectual disability and autistic people. This is the current edition and the figures below supersede earlier ones.

• The median age at death for adults with an intellectual disability was 62.8 years, against 81.8 years in the general population — a gap of 19 years.
• Almost 57% of adults with an intellectual disability died before the age of 65, compared with just under 15% of the general population.
• 39.0% of their deaths were rated avoidable, down from 46.3% in 2021 — but still nearly double the general population rate of 21.1%.

What that means: Of every 100 adults with an intellectual disability who died, 57 died before their 65th birthday. Of every 100 adults in the general population who died, fewer than 15 did — nearly four times fewer. “Avoidable” is a technical term meaning a death good care or public health could have prevented: 39 in every 100 of people with an intellectual disability, compared to 21 in every 100 of the rest of the population.

Read it in full: kcl.ac.uk — the 2024 LeDeR national report

A plain-English summary: mencap.org.uk — health inequalities

4. How few people with intellectual disabilities are in work

Work is where most adults find money, structure, company and a reason to leave the house. This is the figure that decides most of that — and it is the one most often quoted wrongly, because the percentage and the population it describes get separated.

Note: many people with intellectual disabilities may not have the capacity for regular employment in the same way as those without. However, from what we have come to understand from Jen and her friends at DanceSyndrome is that there are many ways that people with intellectual disabilities can engage in meaningful activity that benefits not only them but the community they live in.

Keep Britain Working — the Mayfield review

Sir Charlie Mayfield, for the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business and Trade, autumn 2025 — UK, with the intellectual disability figure for England

A government-commissioned review of health, disability and work stated:

“For those with learning disabilities in England registered with their local authority, employment is vanishingly rare – only 4.8% are in paid work.”

• For disabled people generally, only 53% are in work.
• Disabled people are more than twice as likely to be unemployed, and nearly three times as likely to be economically inactive, as non-disabled people.
• Those in work face a 12.7% pay gap against non-disabled colleagues.

What that means: About 140,000 adults in England get long-term support from their council. They are the people with the highest needs. The 4.8% is of this group, not the whole 1.5 million people with intellectual disabilities.

Read it in full: gov.uk — Keep Britain Working, final report (PDF)

Mencap — employment research

Mencap, drawing on the Department of Health and Social Care (2025), its own 2024 survey, and ONS data — each figure covers a different nation, as marked below

Mencap keeps the different employment figures side by side:

• 6% of adults with an intellectual disability known to their local authority in England are in paid work (DHSC, 2025).
• 29% of 1,107 adults with an intellectual disability surveyed across the UK by Mencap said they were in paid work (October to December 2024).
• 25% of people with severe or specific learning difficulties in Scotland were in work (Annual Population Survey, 2022).

What that means: These figures are not in conflict. They count different people. Around 5 or 6 in every 100 of those known to social services are in paid work. Among the wider population who answer a survey, it is closer to 29 in 100. And for the two in three or more who are on no register at all, nobody knows — because nobody is counting them.

Read it in full: mencap.org.uk — employment research and statistics

5. Taken out of the local area

In the book we write this:

Children with special needs are taxied out of their local area, or placed in settings hundreds of miles from their families and isolated from the communities they belong to.

This is the part some people find hardest to believe: that a child’s school day can begin with a taxi and a journey out of the town where they live.

A note on who these figures cover. From here on the numbers describe children with special educational needs and disabilities — a wider group than intellectual disability alone, taking in physical disability, autism, sensory impairment and more. Of the 8.9 million pupils in England’s schools, 5.3% have an Education, Health and Care plan and another 14.2% get SEN support: over 1.7 million children in total. Children with an intellectual disability are a substantial part of that group, not the whole of it. We have kept the distinction because that is the truth.

National Audit Office — Home to school transport

National Audit Office, 31 October 2025 (HC 1377) — England

The clearest single source on the journeys themselves. The auditors put numbers on something families have described for decades.

• Councils in England spent £2.32 billion on home to school transport in 2023–24.
• Around 180,000 children of compulsory school age receive council transport because of special educational needs and disability.
• The median cost is £8,116 a year for a child with SEND, against £1,526 for a mainstream pupil — more than five times as much. In one case a single pupil’s transport cost £145,000 a year.
• Use of cars, including taxis, for pupils with SEND rose by 36% between 2019 and 2023.
• 13% of under-16s receiving council transport travel outside their local authority to get to school.
• 28% of pupils with an EHC plan live three or more miles from their school, compared with 17% of pupils at mainstream secondaries.

What that means: 180,000 children, out of 8.9 million pupils in England — about one pupil in fifty. Getting one of them to school costs £8,116 a year against £1,526 for a mainstream pupil.

Read it in full: nao.org.uk — Home to school transport (PDF)

Department for Education — Education, health and care plans

Department for Education official statistics, published 25 June 2026 (data as at January 2026) — England

The annual official count. This is where the scale sits, and where the drift towards private provision shows up.

• 718,800 children and young people had an active EHC plan in January 2026 — 12.5% more than a year earlier.
• Independent special schools now account for 16.8% of special school placements, up from 10.1% in 2019.
• 62,400 children and young people with EHC plans are recorded as “educated elsewhere”, including 22,000 not in education, employment or training.

What that means: 718,800 plans across ages 0 to 25. In schools that works out at 5.3% of pupils — roughly one child in nineteen, or one or two in most classrooms. The share of special school places sold by private providers has risen from one in ten to one in six in seven years.

Read it in full: explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk — Education, health and care plans

Education Committee — Solving the SEND Crisis

House of Commons Education Committee, 18 September 2025 — England

Where the out-of-authority figure is stated directly, alongside the growth of the independent sector that absorbs those children.

• Around 9% of pupils in state-funded special schools attend a school outside their home local authority — 12,658 pupils in 2023/24.
• There were 728 independent special schools in 2024, up from 477 in 2018.
• Around 80% of pupils in those schools hold an EHC plan, with the state paying for most placements.

What that means: 12,658 children — about one in eleven of every pupil in a state special school in England — go to school in a different local authority from the one their family lives in. Not a different postcode. A different council area.

Read it in full: publications.parliament.uk — Solving the SEND Crisis

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and ITV News — the distances

Investigation published 28 April 2022 — England

The source of the “hundreds of miles”. Journalists asked every council in England directly, under freedom of information law, and published what came back. The figures are from 2022 and have not, to our knowledge, been repeated on the same scale since.

• At least 43,000 children with special needs were attending schools outside their local area.
• Nearly a third were travelling long distances alone in private taxis.
• More than 100 pupils were placed over 200 miles from home.
• The longest journey recorded ran roughly 650 miles — a child from Tameside placed in the Shetland Islands. A child from Cornwall was placed in Fife, some 500 miles away.

What that means: In January 2022 there were 473,300 children and young people in England with an EHC plan. The 43,000 schooled outside their own area is roughly one in eleven of them. The 100-plus sent more than 200 miles away are a small number of children. Is that really in the best interest of those individual children and their families?

Read it in full: itv.com — the investigation
Also reported here: schoolsweek.co.uk — the council-by-council detail

6. The well-trodden pathway

One review named the pattern. It was written in 2017 for the Department of Health, and it still reads like a description of today.

Dame Christine Lenehan — These Are Our Children

Council for Disabled Children, for the Department of Health, January 2017 — England

This is a short document written by someone who has spent a career in this area, and it says out loud what the statistics only imply.

“They occur in every area and they often follow a well-trodden pathway out of their local authority area, never to come back.”
These Are Our Children, page 3

“Their diagnosis at age two or before was the indicator to the challenges they would face and yet they followed a path which institutionalised them during their teenage years and condemned them to a life hidden from society, away from their families.”
These Are Our Children, page 4

• 1,129 children were in 52-week residential special school placements in 2016 — living away from home all year round.
• Average inpatient costs for an individual child ran to around £1 million every three years.
• The review found placements made at moments of crisis, with individual providers, without any effective framework.

What that means: 1,129 children living away from home for all 52 weeks of the year. Not term time. Not weekdays. Every week, including Christmas. The review found the state was paying around £1 million every three years for some of them.

Read it in full: gov.uk — These Are Our Children (PDF)

7. Where the pathway ends

The journey that starts with a school placement does not always stop there. This is the adult end of the same road — and it is the road our family refused.

Children’s Commissioner for England — Far Less Than They Deserve

Children’s Commissioner for England, 20 May 2019 — England

The report that measured, child by child, how far from home children with intellectual disabilities and autistic children were being held in mental health hospitals.

• Around 250 children with intellectual disabilities or autism were in mental health hospitals in England.
• 95 children were in a ward known to be more than 50km — 31 miles — from home.
• 55 children, nearly a third, were more than 100km — 62 miles — from home.
• 60 children, nearly one in four, had been there at least six months and were at least 50km from home.
• One mother described a 200-mile round trip to visit her daughter.

What that means: Around 250 children were in these hospitals. Of those, 95 were more than 31 miles from home and 55 were more than 62 miles away. These are children, in hospital, being visited by parents who have to plan a day around it. One mother’s round trip was 200 miles.

Read it in full: childrenscommissioner.gov.uk — Far Less Than They Deserve

NHS England — monthly statistics on people in mental health hospitals

NHS England Digital, published monthly — figures below are for August 2026 — England

Updated every month, so this is the source to cite when you need something current rather than historic.

• 2,125 people with an intellectual disability and autistic people were in inpatient services at the end of August 2026.
• 1,025 of them — 48%, nearly half — had been in hospital continuously for more than two years.
• In that month there were 120 admissions and transfers in, and 185 discharges.

What that means: 2,125 people, of whom 1,025 — nearly half — have been there more than two years. Many of these places are called “assessment and treatment units”. Assessment and treatment implies a few weeks. For half the people inside, it has meant years.

Read it in full: digital.nhs.uk — learning disability services statistics
The August 2026 edition: digital.nhs.uk — published 17 September 2026

Care Quality Commission — Out of sight, who cares?

Care Quality Commission, 22 October 2020, with findings from independent reviews carried out November 2019 to September 2020 — England

The regulator’s own review of restraint, seclusion and segregation. It looked at the people held longest and most alone.

• Most of the 43 hospital wards the regulator visited were not therapeutic environments. People felt they were seen as “a collective of behaviours to be ‘managed’”.
• 77 independent reviews were carried out for people with an intellectual disability and autistic people held in long-term segregation.
• Over a third had been in hospital for between 10 and 30 years.
• Some were given their meals “through a hatch in the bottom half of the door”. Some had no access to fresh air for many months.
• One person was regularly restrained for 10 hours a day.
• Contact with staff was sometimes very minimal, with all activity and communication taking place through a locked door.
• Almost half had no plan for getting out of segregation.

What that means: In the book we describe people kept alone “for their own safety”, with food delivered through a hatch and no human contact, in places the regulator found are not therapeutic. Those are not our words for it. They are the regulator’s.

Read it in full: cqc.org.uk — Out of sight, who cares?
The segregation reviews: cqc.org.uk — findings from the independent reviews

Mencap — the cost of keeping people in hospital

Mencap, 21 March 2024 — England

What the parallel universe costs, set against what it delivers.

• £534 million a year spent on inpatient beds for just over 2,000 people.
• Around £237,000 per person per year, rising to roughly £1.2 million over an average stay.
• The average stay is close to five years.
• 41% of those in hospital could have their needs met in the community — around £18 million a month spent on care people do not need.
• One family described travelling 190 miles, a six-hour round trip, to see their son during an 18-month admission.

What that means: £237,000 a year, per person, for just over 2,000 people. A place in a state special school costs £23,900. It costs roughly ten times more to keep someone in a hospital bed than to educate a child — and by Mencap’s reckoning 41 out of every 100 of them did not need to be there at all.

Read it in full: mencap.org.uk — the figures in full

8. What was promised, and when

Nothing on this page is news to government. Every failing described above has been named in an official document, usually more than once, usually with a deadline attached. This is the record.

Unless stated otherwise every document here applies to England. The two Mental Health Acts cover England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland legislate separately.

What that means: Five deadlines with dates on them, across twenty-five years, every one of them missed. Nobody in government has been unaware, and nobody has been vague. The gap between 2001’s promise that everyone would be registered with a GP and 2026’s two-in-three or more who are not shows how little has moved.

What that means: Two rows tell you most of it. Winterbourne View was exposed in 2011 and produced Transforming Care. Whorlton Hall was exposed in 2019 — same programme, same kind of hospital, same abuse — and the people filmed being taunted were there because the 2014 deadline had been missed. The Care Act came between them, and the Local Government Association’s own verdict ten years on was that the law was right and the money never came.

What that means: The Mental Health Act 2025 is the one place in this record where something got better, and it happened because families refused to stop asking. It is proof that none of this is inevitable. It is also not yet in force — proof that changing the law is not the end of the job. There is hope, but we have to keep working to make the change happen.

And before anyone makes this party political: Every government of the last twenty-five years has made this commitment. None has kept it. This is not one party’s failure. It is a settled national habit of meaning well about people with intellectual disabilities and then looking away.

Read the originals: gov.uk — Valuing People (2001)
gov.uk — Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS (2010, PDF)
gov.uk — Transforming Care (2012, PDF)
nao.org.uk — how the 2014 deadline was missed (PDF)
england.nhs.uk — Building the Right Support
lordslibrary.parliament.uk — how the targets have fared
challengingbehaviour.org.uk — the full policy history
legislation.gov.uk — Mental Health Act 2025, autism and learning disability
challengingbehaviour.org.uk — what the 2025 Act does and does not do
challengingbehaviour.org.uk — the Whorlton Hall trial
local.gov.uk — the Care Act 2014, ten years on

9. And not only them — the same map, other people

We know one population from the inside. But the mechanism we found in our own life — not counted, therefore not missed — is not ours alone. Here is the same test applied to six other groups, with our own at the foot of the table: what does the country know about their education, their work, their health, and how often they end up detained?

Many areas are not counted: Who are you missing?

Figures are for England unless noted: the carer and disability-employment rows are UK, the prison and homelessness rows England and Wales, and the ethnicity employment row Great Britain.

What that means: Six blank cells out of twenty-eight. Nobody publishes how homeless people did at school or whether they work. Nobody measures the health of care leavers, or of people after they leave prison. These are not small groups: 5.8 million unpaid carers, 164,040 children homeless with their families, a prison population of around 87,000. Every blank is a question the country has not thought worth asking.

And notice: The rows bleed into one another. Up to half of children in custody have been in care. A third of people sleeping rough in London had been in prison. A third of the prison population has an IQ below 80 and almost none will be on a learning disability register. These are not six populations. They are substantially the same people, counted — where they are counted at all — by six systems that do not talk to each other.

What “no national figure found” means. It means we looked and could not find one published. It does not mean the thing does not happen — it means nobody has made it their business to know. Missing information is how people go missing: you cannot plan for, fund for, or be held to account for a number that does not exist.

Two more groups the book names

Neither fits neatly in the table above, because nobody measures them on the same four counts. Both appear in the book.

People living in poverty — Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UK Poverty 2026, published 27 January 2026 — UK

• 14.2 million people, more than one in five (21%), were in poverty in 2023/24.
• 6.8 million of them were in very deep poverty — the highest number since records began in 1994/95.
• The poverty rate for disabled people was 28%, eight percentage points above non-disabled people.

People with mental health needs — Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2023/4, NHS England, published 27 June 2025 — England

• 22.6% of adults aged 16 to 64 had a common mental health condition, up from 17.6% in 2007.
• Fewer than half of them (47.7%) were receiving any treatment.

What that means: Both groups are growing, and both overlap with every row in the table. Very deep poverty is at a record high. Common mental health conditions have risen in every survey since 2007.

Read it in full: jrf.org.uk — UK Poverty 2026
The mental health survey: natcen.ac.uk — Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2023/4

Sources for this table:
ons.gov.uk — deaths of homeless people
education.ox.ac.uk — care leavers and the labour market (PDF)
prisonreformtrust.org.uk — children in care and custody
gov.uk — offender employment outcomes
lordslibrary.parliament.uk — homelessness among released prisoners
ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk — Attainment 8 by ethnicity
ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk — detentions under the Mental Health Act
carersuk.org — key facts and figures
gov.uk — disability among prisoners (PDF)
publications.parliament.uk — Solving the SEND Crisis (pupils schooled out of area)

10. The principle it is all measured against

Nothing on this page is really an argument about money. It is an argument about who gets to decide. That principle has a name, a history, and — since 2009 — the force of a treaty the UK signed.

Nothing About Us Without Us — where the phrase comes from

James Charlton, University of California Press, 1998

• The Latin form, Nihil de nobis, sine nobis, has roots in Central European political history, where it meant that no law should be made about a group without that group present.
• It entered disability activism in the 1990s and was carried into disability studies by James Charlton’s 1998 book, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment.
• No single person can be credited with coining it in the disability context. It came out of a movement rather than an author — which is rather the point of it.

What that means: People reach for this phrase as though it were legislation. It is not, and it does not need to be. It is the test. Every strategy in the table above was written about people with intellectual disabilities. How many other groups of people aren’t included in policy making that impacts their life?

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Adopted by the United Nations on 13 December 2006. Ratified by the United Kingdom on 8 June 2009.

This is where the principle stops being a slogan and becomes an obligation. Article 4(3) reads:

“In the development and implementation of legislation and policies to implement the present Convention, and in other decision-making processes concerning issues relating to persons with disabilities, States Parties shall closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations.”

• General Comment No. 7, published by the UN committee in 2018, sets out what that duty means in practice.
• 194 states and organisations have now ratified or joined the convention — very nearly every country on earth.

What that means: The UK signed this. A binding commitment, made seventeen years ago.

Read it in full: un.org — the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

What the UN found when it looked at the UK

UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — inquiry 2016, follow-up report April 2024 — UK

The committee that oversees the treaty has examined the UK twice. Both times it found the same thing.

• In 2016 it found grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights in the UK.
• In April 2024, seven years on, it found no significant progress had been made, that the UK had failed to eliminate the root causes of inequality and discrimination, and that there was evidence of regression in some areas.
• The failures it named included the right to live independently and be included in the community, work and employment, and an adequate standard of living.

What that means: The UK signed the treaty, then breached it, then was told so twice by the body that polices it. The second finding names independent living, and work and employment — the two things sections 4 and 7 measure. This is not our reading of the evidence. It is the United Nations reading the same figures and reaching the same conclusion.

What that means: Read it against section 9. Most of the people in that table are not in any organisation, on any register, or in any dataset. You cannot consult people you have not counted.

Read it in full: scottishhumanrights.com — the 2024 follow-up findings

A note on these numbers

Every figure on this page is a person.

A child who gets up earlier than their classmates to sit alone in a taxi. A mother who drives six hours to spend an afternoon with her son. A woman who has been in a hospital bed for ten years because there is no house for her to live in. Nineteen years of somebody’s life, missing.

We have known this world from the inside for more than forty years, and we spent those years refusing to let Jen be taken into it. What these documents show is that the world is real. It is funded. It is counted. And it continues.

Every percentage here is a percentage of them — of 1.5 million people in the UK, most of whom no service has ever counted, and of the millions more abroad who are not counted either. That is what makes it a parallel universe rather than a policy problem: a population the size of a major city, living among us, invisible to the systems built to serve them.

None of this is inevitable. Every one of these numbers is the result of decisions — which means different decisions would produce different numbers.

Look up. Who isn’t in the room?

Beyond Extraordinary: Who Are You Missing? tells the story behind this crusade. Register to hear first about the book.

About this list

All sources are free to read and were checked on 30 September 2026. Where a figure comes from a monthly or annual publication we have said which edition it is from.

Several of these refresh on a cycle and are worth revisiting: the NHS England hospital statistics are published every month, the Department for Education figures every June, and the LeDeR mortality report annually. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism distance figures are from 2022 and should always be dated when quoted — they remain the most detailed council-by-council picture available, but they are not current.

Where we have worked something out ourselves — “one person in 46”, “one pupil in nineteen” — we have done it from the figures in the sources above and said so, rather than presenting our arithmetic as somebody else’s finding. The baselines are the ONS mid-2024 estimate of 69.3 million people in the UK, and the DfE count of just over 8.9 million pupils in England in January 2026.

The promises table in section 8 quotes each document directly wherever a deadline was set, so the wording can be checked against the original. Where a target was missed we have said so on the authority of the National Audit Office, the House of Lords Library or the published NHS figures, not our own reading.

The international figures in section 1 almost all describe disability as a whole rather than intellectual disability, and we have labelled each one accordingly. They are not interchangeable with the UK figures that follow, and we have compared them only where the comparison is fair.