Disability consultants Minty & Friend said that disabled people need encouragement to give things a go when it comes to working.

Phil Friend, director of Minty & Friend, says: ‘ At the moment, Jobcentre Plus, which is the main agency for helping people find work – particularly disabled people – don’t really talk about self-employment as an option.’

He adds that ‘most disabled people become disabled during their working life and later’, something that can have a considerable impact upon a person’s well-being.

For people to get over this, he stated, they need support to see that it is possible to emerge and ‘do something really constructive’.

According to easyJet and Leonard Cheshire there are approximately seven million people of working age in the UK with a long-term disability, and around 50 per cent of them are out of work.