What We Are About

"We are dealing with a health and care body here which will need to re-assess individuals"

This campaign actively pushed for SABP to do just that on the basis of service users needs , abilities and circumstances. Fiona Edwards was directly asked to do this on behalf of the campaign at the recent open public Board meeting and this should be clearly reflected in the minutes.

Everyone had an opportunity to have Fiona , the SABP Chief Executive , address their questions and concerns at the recent Board meeting , there was even a dedicated blog entry to remind people of the deadline to submit them precisely because the Board Meeting fell on the same day as the SABP AGM.

We even opened a room to discuss the questions, it did not work very well but mine were discussed with three other people and coordinated with Jill.

The campaign is also a loose collective effort. For example, another supporter of the campaign is anxious to ask questions at a SABP PPI meeting to be held in Redhill on the 3rd of October. Again, its an opportunity for people to publicly ask questions, particularly as Peter Kinsey's replacement Chris Carter is also going to be there for the sole purpose of answering them.

The Justice for the Surrey & Borders Garden Centre Campaign has always been a broad campaign with as much concern for the general welfare and treatment and care of patients as promoting the national minimum wage and employment rights for service users. Many of the garden centre workers are probably not patients, they are people with learning difficulties.

We, the majority of people involved with this campaign, largely come at things from a mental health angle however we need to stop imposing our experiences on everyone – including each other sometimes - and start acknowledging and respecting difference otherwise we could find ourselves being accused of disability discrimination.

At the Board meeting we also asked for more consultation with carers as well. In some campaigns carers are frowned upon however this campaign would never have gotten off the ground if one of the garden center workers parents had not contacted the media and got a article on Surrey & Borders decision to cut the workers £3 a day payments in the local newspaper.

Understandably not everyone is going to be happy with the term 'worker' seemingly being used as a synonym for 'patient' ( in which sphere of life is terminology not a problem?) but that is not what has been happening here , indeed the original issue as reported in the local media, flagged up by a Surrey MP and then raised by Jez Bryce , Silvis and others on various MH boards was about disabled people working in the trusts garden centre and other works services having their £3 daily payments taken from them and being expected to work for nothing.

For that to have happened at all, those disabled people clearly had no rights. Indeed, the SABP Board has since unreservedly apologised and admitted the Trust acted on bad advice and wrongly.

Furthermore it transpired , through a Government Report that Jill dug up, that there was a pattern of this happening to disabled people across the country and this information was not released as a part of some NIMHE conspiracy as some may think as organisations like NIMHE, Trusts , the charities and local authorities were identified and slammed in the report as the very organizations engaged in exploiting disabled people in their workplaces.

Indeed, we have just seen the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health implicated in this during the modernization and externalization of SABP’s work services , particularly Dr Helen Lockett , who has elsewhere written articles condemning others for doing it.

These organizations don’t want to pay disabled people real wages but they are certainly happy to profit from getting real work off them as I discovered recently when a friend of mine who has been working as an IT assistant for the same well known charity for the last five years ( he even designed the database component of the charity’s website ) was given the task of printing off the new Directors introductory speech which praised everybody who worked for the charity except its ‘ volunteers’.

How can a national charity have unemployed disabled volunteers ( or any other for that matter ) working for them for five years without so much as a contract.

It’s a national disgrace as there’s nothing charitable about that kind of exploitation.

Ditto for many services and voluntary sector training schemes. They are not professionally operated or recognized schemes at all. Disabled people should have access to quality professional training and receive payment at the minimum wage level of the equivalent of an education grant as they are trained.

Being disabled and unemployed should not fear their situation screams out ‘ Hey come make some money off me pretending to train me or find me a job’.

Disabled people shouldn’t just be targetted by Government Departments, services or charities just because they are on benefits either. Not all disabled people are service users in the sense the term has been bandied around in this thread and not all service users are going to benefit from employment and training schemes either. Most people understand this.

But lets make one thing clear, it costs services and charities next to nothing to operate cheap employment and training programs where disabled people work or train for nothing and have no contractual or other rights, so it seems to me that we best protect disabled people from being abused in these schemes by ensuring that the minimum wage is paid as Trusts and charities arent going to be that keen to pay people more to get them off a lesser amount in benefits if they know there is little chance of doing so anyway.

At the moment it pays services and the charities to do this because they get funded by the DWP and other bodies and the disabled workers and trainees arent a cost. The introduction of the national minimum wage though would, through the price mechanism , prompt services and the charities to better target this provision at people who actually wanted and were clearly able to benefit from it.

More to the point, just expecting people to be nice and kind clearly hasnt worked here has it? nor has the PPI mechanism or any of the other costly bureaucratic nonsense which is supposed to be in place to protect disabled people as workers or patients.

There were no protections in place here.

Thats why this blog exists and why different people bring different skills , abilities, experiences , concerns and ways of doing things to the campaign. I hope people will continue to do this and as long as they do this blog is going to remain online.