Disability Access has Many Dimensions

Yesterday, Andy, a Unite Comrade and disability activist, posted this on Facebook. 

“Just got refused access to tram – ‘no room’. Yes it was crowded but 6 people not in wheelchair allowed. Go figure…”

Andy has more bottle than me. As a wheelchair user I would not even attempt to try to board a crowded bus during rush hour, or indeed any time. And this isn’t restricted to transport. Public meetings, cafes, bars, pubs and restaurants present similar problems to wheelchair users as public transport.

A public transport vehicle or building can be fully disability access compliant yet prove to be inaccessible. Access works on an empty or moderately populated bus. The driver is alerted, she closes the doors, the ramp is lowered, the doors re-open, the wheelchair user boards the vehicle, and positions herself in the allocated space. 

However, when crowding and overcrowding are factored into the equation space becomes limited. Sometimes passengers are so crammed in to the bus that those wishing to alight from the vehicle have difficulty moving along the bus.

Since you can’t fit a pint into a half pint pot, what is the solution? How do we fit wheelchairs onto buses, trams or trains where there is literally no room to move?

Personally, I find similar problems in public meetings. As a rule, I prefer to be close to a door to facilitate easy egress. Trying to extricate myself from a crowded room draws unwanted attention, and I feel as though I’m being disruptive.

Pubs and restaurants present similar difficulties. My friends are great. Usually when I’m invited out to eat or for a few beers my pals have researched the venue and checked out the access. But a pub with level access and an adapted toilet (my main access needs for pubs and eateries) becomes fairly inaccessible when it begins to become crowded. 

Should I expect pub landlords to restrict the numbers of drinkers allowed access in order to satisfy my access needs?

Though while pub overcrowding is a difficult issue. The same can’t necessarily be said for restaurants. The same problems present themselves when eating out. Why do restauranteurs feel the need to occupy every square centimetre of their establishments with tables and chairs? They cram tables and seating into every conceivable crack and cranny. Of course, it’s to maximise profits. But for wheelchair users, and no doubt others, it makes life very difficult.

The solutions to bus and tram design are possibly easier to arrive at than overcrowding in pubs and restaurants. Designers could look to incorporating wheelchair only spaces on buses. Spaces on buses and trams controlled by the driver and cordoned off for wheelchairs only access.  

Unfortunately, I don’t have ready solutions for all these problems. 

But of course, the tram driver should not have stopped Andy boarding the vehicle while allowing half-a-dozen passengers to board.

A National Independent Living Service is needed for the universal provision of social care and support

Hello, I’m Seàn McGovern, a trade union and disability activist who works in the social care and support sector as a direct payments worker.

Comrades, we have a government riven by internecine conflict.

A government that dithers over Brexit while UK the social care sector is in chaos.  

English councils will have managed reductions to their core funding from national government totalling £16 billion between 2010 and 2020.

Since 2008 local authority spending on adult social care has fallen by almost 10%.

However, with the growth in the elderly population funding has fallen by 13.5% in real terms.

Between 2017 and 2020 a further funding gap of £2.3 billion is expected.

We hear of people with complex social care needs that are doubly incontinent sleeping on plastic sheets in order not to soil their bed linen.

Disabled people who cannot leave their homes because they are unable to clean themselves and so wish to preserve their dignity.

Social care packages are being cut to the bone.

Under the Independent Living Fund scheme disabled people enjoyed care and support packages that regarded social interaction as a human need.

Today care managers reduce these packages to a bare minimum, and yes, below.

People may be visited two or three times a day, seven days a week.

They may encounter different agency workers at every call.

Comrades, a million disabled people are going without the social care they need to eat, dress, or leave the house.

With a further 1.2 million older disabled people in a similar position. 

The number of older people with unmet care needs increased by 200,000 in the last year alone.

Workers, Comrades, who themselves are an undervalued group.

But I’ll come to those who deliver the services in a minute. 

The crisis in social care is leading to more and more disabled people experiencing social isolation.

Which in turn creates social exclusion.

Whose debilitating effects can lead to a break down in mental health, greater incidence of suicide and a general deterioration overall health.

Ex-ILF recipients are seeing their packages stripped right back.

This despite the fact that the government is continuing to pay councils the ILF budgets until April 2020.

Unsatisfied with cutting care and support packages, Comrades.

Many councils are now totally disregarding the ethos of Personalisation, of giving control of personal care and support is eroding.

Direct payments is a method whereby disabled people buy in their own care and support.

This has become the preferred method of care and support delivery for a majority of people deemed to have care and support needs.

Its selling points have been personalisation, whereby the service user with her or his own budget were afforded more independence and choice in arranging their support time.

It affords greater choice giving flexibility, continuity and more creativity in the day to day running of social care and support.

Essentially, it widened our scope for control, thus greater independence.

Today however care managers are trying to force service users to take on specially designed payment cards.

Cards that allow the council to closely monitor every penny you spend, when you spend it and on what it is spent.

Cards that give the council the power to come in at any time and cut payments.

Just to make things clear.

This crisis cuts across every aspect of social care and support.

Disabled children, young adults, adults of working age and elderly people are impacted aversely by the austerity measures in social care.

I suspect you’re all now waiting for me to announce some of the positives to personalisation and social care and support.

Sadly folks, I can only add to the ingredients of this perfect storm of a crisis.

Despite the cuts to packages and the ever narrowing of benefits of personalisation and social care, many have to pay for this privilege.

Yes, many recipients of social care and support have a personal charge levied.

In some cases, people are paying in excess of £70 per week.

People who rely on state benefits.

Fundamentally, this is a tax on disability. 

This tax has created a new phenomenon known as “social care debt”.

This occurs when people become so poor that they cannot afford to pay the personal charge for social care levied on them by their councils.

It is estimated that around 160,000 people are living with “social care debt”.

Councils have brought around 1,100 too poor to pay their personal charge to court.

Even taking things from a service users point of view, I think you’ll all agree that social care and support is in crisis.

Yet Comrades, disabled people are but one factor in this chaotic equation.

The people who deliver the services are also going through a crisis.

Recent figures show that the annual turnover of all care staff was 27.8 per cent.

Hardly surprising given the terms and conditions under which they work.

Zero-hour contracts appear to be the norm in this sector.

Around half of them are paid at the minimum wage of £7.83 per hour.

A typical care worker could begin work at 6 am.

Finish work at 8 pm.

And yet only receive 7 or 8 hours pay, often less, for what is in effect a 14-hour day.

Personal assistants, carers and support workers employed by direct payments clients often fare no better.

Much care and support is planned for three to four short visits per day.

Maybe 45 minutes in the morning followed by 15-30 minutes slots during the day into the evening.

As a consequence, these workers usually depend on more than one job to build up working week.

I know PAs and carers who have four and five clients per week. 

Such job insecurity is precarious at its best and financially, physically, mentally and emotionally challenging at its worse.

Basically, our social care and support system abuses both recipient and care provider.

We as a wealthy and civilised society cannot leave the delivery of these services to the vagaries of an austerity-imposed economy an economy enslaved by neoliberal vampire capitalism.

Comrades, just as the post-war Atlee government created an HNS free at the point of delivery and need.

Some in the movement are calling for social care to be firmly tied into the NHS.

However, there is a groundswell within the movement that supports a National Independent Living Service.

We view health needs and social care, or as we prefer to term it, Independent Living, as two separate, indeed sometimes opposing entities.

We believe that inextricably tying social care to health would further medicalise disability.

This is at a time when the disability movement is promoting a Social Model of Disability as the paradigm to follow.

For example, the borough in which I work has around 600 people using direct payments.

However, only around 30 of these have continues health care packages.

The support plan that underpins my care package does not have any medical interventions.

Instead it allows my needs to be met by PAs who support me through a number of personal care, daily living activities such as meal preparation and cooking as well as social-type activities, such a tonight.

The only viable solution to an effective and dignified delivery of social care and support is via a National Independent Living Service.

A service akin to the NHS that is free at the point of delivery and need.

A standalone service with its own budget funded through general taxation.

A service not at the mercy of local council budget cuts.

A service that can link in with health, social services, education, housing, employment, etc.

A service that serves both our care and needs as well as support in our social lives.

A bread and roses service that sees beyond the corporeal seeking to cater for our overall wellbeing and social independence.   

Elin Ersson - a true fighter against injustice

When Elin Ersson knew that an Afhan man was being deported from Sweden to Afghanistan she bought a ticket on the same Gothenburg to Istanbul, then onto Kabul, flight.   

Elin had evidence that if delivered to Kabul the man would most likely face death. Yet despite this a number on board the flight were rude towards her and her actions. An Englishman was particularly boorish and loutishly grabbed Elin’s phone. 

However, a group of football supporters stood up in solidarity with Elin. Eventually Elin was successful as the Afghan man was taken off the flight.

A distraught Elin on the left -
A happier Elin on hearing that the deportation wasn't taking place

What Elin did took guts. A truly selfless act. She was in danger both physically and emotionally. She had the power of the state and airline company against her. Sadly, she also had some disgruntled holidaymakers against her. 

But she ignored all the external pressures and influences and spoke and stood up against tyranny. As long as we have the Elin Ersson's of this world on our side, we will not be defeated. 

Respect and Solidarity to and with Elin, and all the other Elin's making a stand against oppression and oppressors.

I'm feeling like shit warmed up.

To quote my old mate Brian, the Codfather, "I've got the right pox with things."

Early this week I felt the first tickling around the nasal region. 

You know the indistinct yet irritating little tickle you get around the sinuses that presage flu or one of its only slightly less nasty fucking siblings, the full-blown head cold.

The kind of viral cold that creates a veritable Niagara Falls of snot; a throat so sore it's as though someone has been hacking away at it with a blunt 2" paring chisel; coughing fits the violence of which could serve as the score to a budget mountain cabin chain-massacre B-movie; nasal congestion that could compete with a traffic snarl-up on the Euston Road at 4.30 pm on a summer Friday running into bank-holiday weekend; sneezing fits that project great strings of snot in all directions; my head is full of Bowler-Hatted Billy Boys Bigots banging their Lambeg drums as they march triumphantly to the beat of their historical hatred across my grey matter; a fever that's confusingly competing with our sultry summer night heat; and a feeling of overall shittiness dosed every couple of hours with a cocktail of Lemsip and poitín. 

Add to this a red-hot pain between the shoulders and down the neck; and, so as not to feel left out of things the sacrum and lumbar regions have come out in sympathy - as though secondary picketing was legal! 

I'm off to bed.

By publicly calling Jeremy Corbyn a "Fucking antisemite and a racist” Margaret Hodge has brought the Labour Party into disrepute

"The new code of conduct drawn up by Labour officials in the wake of protests by Jewish groups against antisemitism this year, states criticism of the state of Israel and its policies should not automatically be regarded as antisemitic."
No country, including the UK, should be beyond criticism and reproach for its actions and policies. The Labour Party obviously also holds to this basic tenet, freedom of speech.
Yesterday in parliament Margaret Hodge exercised her right to freedom of speech. In a fit of vitriolic rage, she called the leader of her political party, Jeremy Corbyn, a "fucking antisemite and a racist”. Hodge chose her moment by challenging Corbyn out of sight of cameras behind the Speaker's Chair in the House of Commons following the close vote on Brexit.  
Hodge has not hidden her anti-Corbyn sentiments in the past. Indeed, she and Corbyn have a long history of fighting from opposite sides of the Labour Party for years in Islington. 
However, when any of us exercise our right to free speech, we must also accept that with this freedom comes responsibility. So Margaret, feel free to vent your vitriolic spleen, but you will now have to face up the Labour Party's disciplinary rules.