Nine out of 10 people in Britain have never had a disabled person in their house for a social occasion, claims a survey from a disability charity.

Scope says the survey shows that disabled people are socially excluded.

While the survey found widespread backing for equal opportunities, in practice few people have any personal dealings with people with disabilities.

The charity's chief executive, Richard Hawkes, says disabled people are "invisible in day-to-day life".

The Scope survey, based on a sample of more than 2,000 adults across Britain, suggests public support for the rights of disabled people to be part of mainstream society is not matched by everyday experience.

It suggests people with physical and mental disabilities remain excluded from many people's social or work life.

'Fringes of society'
According to the Scope survey, almost two in five people do not know anyone outside of their own family who is disabled.

And only a fifth of people in the survey have ever worked with a disabled person.

According to Scope, about one in 10 of the non-pensioner population is disabled.

I can believe that.

My wife's younger brother is severely disabled and lives in supported housing. In the year and a half he has been there, the care agency has been replaced twice, been through several carers because they can't be bothered to look after him properly. Social Services are no help when these issues are brought to there attention. They prattle on about "independence in the community" and nothing else. Despite promising that there would be activities for him and he would not get bored, they lied.

Yes Social Services are appalling at providing for the disabled. They go in already with an idea of what you can should be getting in terms of assistance, and take forever to actually get close to what is workable for the person involved. It is institutional abuse. Independence in the community for social services means that it has no impact on them or their budget. Even in a unitary council they can find ways of denying you access to services saying that they should be provided by someone else. They then wind the disabled person up so much, that they get abusive and then social services mark the person down and difficult and disruptive, and then do nothing. It is actually a way of them stopping them having to provide any assistance. I can only see the situation getting far worse with the budget cuts.

With regards to my wife's brother, the original care agency admitted that they employ untrained foreign students. Social Services contracted them because they were the cheapest. For me "Independence in the community" has come stick them in a flat/house somewhere and wash their hands of them. More so when that person has no independence and there is no community to speak of.

If they're referring to obvious physical disability such as paraplegia, then that's only about 1 in 2000 people. I have about 20 friends who might visit, so statistically I should have 0.01 paraplegic guests. That accords with my observation, suggesting no prejudice.

The exact wording doesn't matter.

And it's not just health stuff either - 1 in x people have debts of more than £10k, xx% of people do x,y,z etc

So I've known 2 "diabled" people, both whom held down jobs and had good social/family lives. It's therefore difficult for me to actually understand how much more "disabled" people feel socially excluded than many "able" bodied people.