Health and care services

From rights to reality: how is Northern Ireland measuring up?

Photo1 Welfare reform is stereotyping disabled people and undermining their rights, Disability Action Chief Executive Monica Wilson writes. It’s time for us all to change attitudes.

Four headlines in one week in June dealt with disability issues: Hate crimes against disabled people soar to a records level (The Independent); 60 mile taxi trip for a benefits assessment (BBC Northern Ireland News Online); Minister vows to look at impact of plan to cut benefits (Belfast Telegraph Online); Well, just who would you like living next door to you? (Belfast Telegraph Online).

These articles reinforce the constant negativity of discussions about the lives of disabled people in Northern Ireland and demonstrate how the gap between policy and practice is one of the greatest threats to disabled people attaining their full rights.

The policy and legislative context

Any consideration of rights here immediately polarise views: Whose rights? What about responsibilities? For disabled people, rights are not part of some academic debate. They are about poverty and lack of access to public provision that non-disabled people all take for granted.

In 2009, the UK ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and in July last year the UK submitted its report to the UN on how the Convention is being implemented and what progress has been made. In Northern Ireland, the Executive published its contribution to the overall UK report.

In April this year, the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) launched a consultation on a draft Disability Strategy, which has taken nearly eight years to produce. Disabled people feel that this timescale clearly shows the lack of focus on their needs.

The Welfare Reform Bill is likely to be going before the Assembly by the end of June, and the good news is that the Bill will receive full scrutiny as it passes through the Assembly in the coming months. However that’s the only good news as more and more of us live in the fear of the effects of this legislation. Most people recognise the need for welfare reform but oppose these proposals, which we believe are about saving money rather than supporting disabled people.

However there is some good news. The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland is currently promoting key areas of disability law reform which need to be taken forward in order to ensure that disabled people living here have the same protections as those living elsewhere in the UK.

The outcomes of the Review of Adult Social Care will have a significant impact on people with disabilities, and will hopefully ensure that disabled people have more choice and control over the way their care is delivered.

The Mental Capacity Bill that is currently being drafted will probably be the largest piece of legislation to ever go through the Assembly, but if done well it will ensure the rights of disabled people in an innovative piece of legislation.

How is policy working in practice?

The significant impact of current policy and legislation on disabled people clearly demonstrates that the Executive is not yet taking a true rights-based approach. Too often little thought is given to finding ways to measure the impacts that they have on disabled people’s lives.

Is there a link between the recent press articles on disability hate crime and welfare reform? In a recent report by Glasgow Media Group, it found that there had been three times as much use of words such as ‘scrounger’, ‘cheat’ and ‘skiver’ in tabloid stories on disability in the last five years. Attributing these words to disabled people creates a change in the public perception of disability and this change is for the worse.

Public perception is that the level of fraud in relation to disability benefits is high, where in fact it is between 1 per cent and 2 per cent and is among the lowest. There is an increasing worry among disability rights campaigners that messages around welfare reform are putting disability rights back by years and that increasing levels of disability hate crime are being experienced.

Photo2 While it is absolutely essential that the DSD Minister considers the impact to welfare reform he, along with his Executive colleagues, must also look at the impact of the messages being sent out about us.

A gentleman has been told that he has to travel 60 miles to another assessment centre as the assessment centre in Belfast is not on the ground floor. The reason given for this was that the man would not be able to evacuate the centre quickly enough, so on the grounds of health and safety, they could not assess him in Belfast as the assessment room is on the third floor.

At what stage of the policy development did officials think that it would be suitable to put an assessment centre on the third floor of a building that didn’t have suitable evacuation procedures in place for people with disabilities? The very nature of the benefit that is being assessed would indicate that a high proportion of those attending for assessment would have some level of disability.

If you look at this case in the context of current disability and equality legislation, was this person treated equally? The answer is clearly no. This person will now have the additional stress of having to travel a considerable distance to an area he is not familiar with and is being treated differently because he has a physical disability.

The last article mentioned relates to recent research by the Equality Commission, which found that attitudes are hardening towards people with physical and learning disabilities and mental ill-health in the workplace. More than a quarter of respondents (26 per cent) said they would mind having someone with mental ill-health as a work colleague, compared to 17 per cent three years ago. Sometimes the biggest barriers that disabled people face in accessing employment and services are other people’s attitudes.

Making rights a reality

The biggest change that needs to happen to make rights a reality for disabled people in Northern Ireland is a change in attitudes and perceptions.

We already know that despite discrimination legislation many disabled people are discriminated against when they apply for jobs. Significant work needs to be undertaken to create more positive attitude among employers, in public, private and voluntary sectors. Disabled people want to work, so we need to ensure that they get the right support at the right time and that employers better understand how to make sure that they treat disabled people fairly in recruitment and employment.

Disabled people need to be seen as citizens who want to fully contribute to society and not scroungers, skivers or objects of charity.

Each of us has a role to play in this work.

Disability-LOGO-254C For further information on the work of Disability Action, please contact:

Tel: 028 9029 7880
Textphone: 028 9029 7882
Email: hq@disabilityaction.org
Web: www.disabilityaction.org

You can sign up to our e-zines and Disability Assembly Monitor on our website.

Twitter: @disabilityni

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