Disability Equality Duty
The Disability Equality Duty for the public sector came into effect today.
For the best chance to achieve disability equality, public authorities should involve disabled people in the development of their Disability Equality Schemes and beyond.
Fiona Edwards and the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust have not been doing this, we have had to campaign to get our voices heard.
The involvement of disabled people requires active engagement of disabled stakeholders rather than purely consultation. ( which Fiona was none to keen on anyway)
It must also be focused and joined up to avoid involvement fatigue on all sides.
Disabled people can bring a wide range of knowledge and expertise. This campaign has shown this to Fiona and the Board of the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust and the new duty is a great opportunity to tackle inequality and allow the Trust to utilise the expertise on its doorstep.
Could we please have the equal Opportunities stats for how many service users SABP employs in manual jobs at the National Minimum Wage and above now Fiona as this just became a Disability Access to Public Services Issue.
posted by simply human @ 8:53 am
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I found the following artivle in Community Care and it shows just how much this Disability Equality Duty is needed. Strong equal opportunity policies are needed but SABP does not even monitor where it is employing disabled people. Officially they do not even know if employees are disabled unless they mention this on application forms. That is Jo Young et als answer to making sure hey have good equal opportunity policies. They don't. They bury their heads in the sand and give a contract to run services to The Richmond Fellowship who will create no new job opportunities. And so we see below disabled people end up twice as likely to be poor:
Disabled people twice as likely to be poor
Posted: 04 December 2006 | Subscribe Online
writes Helen McCormack
An assessment of poverty in Britain has found disabled people are twice as likely to be poor than the able bodied, and the gap has widened in the past decade.
The annual report by think tank the New Policy Institute found 30 per cent of disabled adults of working age lived on 60 per cent of average income levels.
Lack of access to paid work was cited as the main reason, with disabled graduates who wanted to work considerably more likely to be unemployed than an unqualified able-bodied person.
The report, funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, also found that benefits for out of work people without dependent children were worth 20 per cent less, relative to earnings, than in 1997.
I have been consulted in regard to 5 different DES's each has made the basic error of saying involved(which is a requirement of the DED), to date there has been no involvement only consultation. The result of the consultation has then been prioritised by an authority member and in one case passed before being presented to the disabled community for comment/criticism.This is tokenism and an attempt to be seen to be doing instead of actually doing.
Think the blog is great.
Thanks Andy. The situation you describe seems to be the norm across most Trusts and Local Authorities ,a great official talking up of improvement of services and Equal Opportunities by managers when the reality is services are being cut back and people with disabilities are simply being discriminated against and failed.
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