Train company pays £17,000 after repeatedly leaving disabled woman stranded
A disabled woman who was left stranded on trains and station platforms more than 30 times by a rail company has been awarded compensation of £17,000.
Southern admitted repeatedly failing to deal with the discrimination Sam Jennings was facing, even after senior managers met with her and disabled campaigner Baroness [Tanni] Grey-Thompson in the House of Lords in January 2020.
Jennings, who was initially encountering the access issues while she was running her own flower stall at Norbury station in south London, tried again and again to persuade Southern to address its failings.
She first encountered problems within days of using a powerchair for the first time in August 2018, and soon began recording every incident on her mobile phone.
She told Disability News Service that, as a new wheelchair-user, the access failings she was experiencing felt like a “baptism of fire”.
She said she felt disabled by the attitude of Southern staff, and she would hear staff phoning colleagues and telling them: “There’s a wheelchair down here complaining.”
Others would just tell her it was not their job to help her.
She would find herself left on the train when she was trying to make her way to work at Norbury, or while heading to hospital appointments.
Despite her insistence that staff always phone ahead to her destination station, there would frequently be no-one there to assist her off the train when she arrived.
She was often forced to block the doors with her feet or her chair until fellow passengers could find a member of staff.
After months of access failings, and despite the House of Lords meeting, she finally decided that she would have to take legal action.
Southern has now agreed to pay her £17,000 compensation and to make several “specific commitments” on access.
She said she was “really excited” when she first heard of the settlement, but then she “cried for ages”.
She said: “Last night was the first time I realised that I feel vindicated for being so determined. I cried my eyes out. It hit me: how dare they do this to me.”
She said she had initially not wanted to involve lawyers because she considered some of the Southern staff were friends, after working with them for years, and she was convinced they would resolve the problems.
But a week after the House of Lords meeting, when she faced a particularly serious failure by staff at Clapham Junction, she realised that Southern “had not learned a thing” and she would need to involve lawyers.
She said: “The problem persisted because there is a culture at Southern of not giving a f***.
“There is no humanity there and they have been allowed to get away with it. It’s about attitudes and there is no accountability. They knew they would never get in trouble.
“From the beginning, I thought if I was one person encountering this many fails, how many disabled people are at home too terrified to go anywhere?”
She has already used some of the compensation to buy 10 new kettles and six microwaves for a local foodbank, while she is also buying herself a new foldable electric wheelchair.
She said: “No-one sets out to get involved with litigation and I saw legal action as a last resort.
“It wouldn’t have cost them a penny if they had listened to me.”
Among Southern’s pledges, it says it will investigate and record any failure to provide assistance, and it will provide disability equality training to all station staff by the end of July.
It also says that all relevant staff have been told how they need to call ahead to a destination station to ensure assistance is provided, with support from a new internal phone directory app.
Extra staff have also been deployed to help with assisted travel at Clapham Junction station, where Jennings encountered many of her problems.
Despite those pledges, Jennings said she was “not at all optimistic” that there will be real change.
But she said she hopes her legal victory will empower other disabled people to take similar action.
She said: “I want people to feel empowered to make a complaint because they are never going to stop otherwise.”
Her lawyer, Carrie Clewes, from the disabled-led legal film Fry Law, said Jennings had attempted – and failed – to resolve the case on many occasions before taking legal action.
She said: “Despite having Lady Tanni Grey-Thompson fighting her corner and calling a meeting at the House of Lords with Southern’s leadership team, again her requests and needs were ignored and [she] continued to have access issues.”
Even after Southern accepted its failings, and made some changes, she continued to experience access failings in the weeks leading up to the legal settlement, said Clewes.
She said that Southern “had no choice but to accept that they didn’t have the matter in hand, despite their assurances”.
Clewes said she hoped the case would help Southern realise its failings and implement the necessary changes.
She added: “If the claimant has had so many failings in one small part of the rail network, just how many of the disabled community are experiencing the same failings across the entire network?”
Chris Fowler, Southern’s customer services director, said in a statement: “We know we can do better and we are grateful for the discussions we have had with Ms Jennings which have helped inform how we can continue to improve.
“We take this feedback extremely seriously and it has been used to strengthen our accessibility strategy, which is already delivering significant improvements across our rail network.”
11 March 2021
Legal action launched over ‘blatant discrimination’ of DWP’s £20-a-week uplift
Two disabled people have launched a legal action against the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over its failure to offer recipients of so-called legacy benefits the same £20-a-week benefit increase given to those on universal credit.
They and hundreds of thousands of other disabled people were outraged when chancellor Rishi Sunak again failed to provide them with the same benefit “uplift” that was first handed to universal credit claimants at the start of the pandemic last March.
Instead, Sunak used last week’s budget to extend the uplift to those on universal credit for another six months.
This means that an estimated 1.9 million disabled people will continue to miss out on the £20-a-week payments.
The two campaigners have secured legal aid for their claim for judicial review of the failure to extend the uplift to those on the out-of-work disability benefit, employment and support allowance (ESA).
They are arguing, through legal firm Osbornes Law, that the government’s decision has unlawfully discriminated against them as disabled people, under the European Convention on Human Rights.
One of the two claimants has requested anonymity, but the other, Philip Wayland, from Essex, told Disability News Service (DNS) that he believes the failure to extend the uplift was “blatant discriminatory policy”.
He said: “Their claim is ‘we have put our arms around the most vulnerable people’, when they have categorically not done that.
“After 10 years of it, that is what pushed me into it, because I have had enough.
“It was an accumulation of the last 10 years, feeling as though we were being treated as second-class citizens, of years of feeling ignored and treated badly.”
He said he believed that the government was deliberately withholding the uplift from disabled people to try to force them to move onto universal credit and its stricter regime of conditions and sanctions.
Wayland, who has been receiving ESA for the last 10 years, is set to receive an annual inflation-linked increase of just 65p a week in his ESA next month.
Both the Commons work and pensions committee and DWP’s own social security advisory committee have called on DWP to extend the uplift to those on legacy benefits.
And last week, as part of its #20More4All campaign, Disabled People Against Cuts delivered mail bags full of the testimonies of disabled people to DWP, the Treasury and 10 Downing Street, describing the financial struggles they had faced during the pandemic.
Many of them wrote of their “soaring food costs”, including the extra costs of needing to have food delivered during the pandemic, and how they have “to choose between eating and heating”.
One said: “I would be able to bathe more and have my heating on. And be able to eat three times a day instead of two times.”
Another said simply: “On chemo… need to eat properly.”
Wayland said he was appalled when he heard Therese Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, tell an MP this week that she did not even ask Sunak to extend the uplift to those on legacy benefits.
Coffey told the SNP’s Marion Fellows to encourage people on legacy benefits to “go to independent benefits calculators to see whether they would automatically be better off under universal credit (UC)” rather than waiting to be moved across to UC by DWP in the next few years.
Early in the crisis, Coffey had argued that extending the uplift to those on legacy benefits like ESA and jobseeker’s allowance would risk the “safety and the stability of the benefit system”.
Only last week, DNS reported how it was branded “vexatious” by DWP for trying to secure a key unpublished document that could finally show how many disabled people are expected to lose out in the move to universal credit.
The most recent DWP equality impact assessment, published nearly a decade ago, in November 2011, suggested that the number of disabled households gaining financially from universal credit would be at least matched by the number losing out (with about 800,000 households in each group), with disabled people who are out of work particularly likely to lose out.
By noon today (Thursday), the Treasury had still not been able to explain last week’s decision not to extend the uplift to those on legacy benefits.
A DWP spokesperson said the department could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings, but he pointed to the comments made by Coffey on Monday, and similar comments by fellow DWP minister Will Quince, who said the uplift had been introduced “to support those facing the most financial disruption due to the pandemic”.
11 March 2021
Pandemic ‘has exposed the shadow of eugenics’, TUC conference hears
The “shadow of eugenics” is hanging over the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, disabled trade unionists have been told at their annual conference.
Speaker after speaker at the annual TUC disabled workers’ conference spoke of how government decisions – and the actions of doctors – had exposed entrenched discrimination and abuse of disabled people’s rights.
Many of those who spoke yesterday (Wednesday), on the first day of the two-day conference, highlighted how official figures showed disabled people had accounted for six in 10 COVID-related deaths.
Natasha Hirst, from the National Union of Journalists, said the figure in Wales was even higher, at 68 per cent of COVID-related deaths in the early months of the pandemic.
Hirst told the online conference: “Our exclusion is driven by political and social attitudes. We are not valued.”
She said the UK government had been warned by the UN’s disability committee in 2017 that its violations of disabled people’s human rights had caused a “human catastrophe”, but it had failed to act.
She said: “The UK government was warned, they were given solutions, but they dismissed them all. This is the consequence.
“When governments deprioritise us, so do employers and service-providers, and everybody else.
“We have experienced how easily in a crisis our human rights are discarded… they are not our rights if they are snatched away when we need them most.”
Lucy Burke, from the University and College Union (UCU), said it was clear that the lives of disabled people were being lost because of “deeply entrenched discrimination”.
She said: “Nothing tells us more about the profound systemic ableism that blights people’s lives and life chances than the fact that doctors have to be reminded not to deny critical care to disabled people simply because they are disabled.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the human rights abuses experienced by disabled people in this country.
“The right to life and to adequate healthcare are fundamental rights that we are seeing persistently violated.
“The pandemic has also enabled non-disabled people to openly talk about the rationing of critical care and about lives that are and apparently are not worth saving or living.”
Dave Allan, the disabled members representative on the TUC’s general council, and co-chair of its disabled workers’ committee, said: “Disabled people have been forced to pay the price for government failings, often with our lives.
“The government were looking into herd immunity [at the start of the pandemic], while other governments were locking down their borders.”
The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, was another who referred to the suggestion that, early in the pandemic, the government had discussed a possible “herd immunity” strategy that would allow the virus to sweep across the country almost unhindered, in a bid to protect the economy.
She said the government had been slow and “resistant” to ordering a lockdown in the early days of the crisis.
She told the conference: “There was all that talk about herd immunity, survival of the fittest is what that says to me, and I think again we have to be honest, in this conference of all conferences, that the shadow of eugenics hangs over the whole debate, that some lives are cheaper than others.”
She pointed to the “do not resuscitate” (DNR) orders placed on the files of people with learning difficulties.
She said: “If that doesn’t tell you something, I don’t know what does.
“But it is ugly, it is obscene, and I think it needs calling out, because never again should we be in this position where people’s lives are put on the line because of their disability.”
Elane Heffernan, from UCU, told the conference that the actions of the government and doctors had highlighted and increased the discrimination faced by disabled people.
She said: “Whether it was the disdain for the lives of working-class people that we see in the herd immunity or the failure to protect us from the eugenics of the medical model that we see in the DNR notices… for disabled workers, the pandemic has deepened the prejudice and inequality that we face at work every day.”
11 March 2021
Disabled workers ‘have had rights repeatedly breached during pandemic’
Disabled workers have had their rights repeatedly breached during the coronavirus pandemic, the annual conference of disabled trade unionists has heard.
The TUC disabled workers’ conference heard how disabled workers had been forced by employers to risk their lives by attending work, while others had had to fight for employers to make reasonable adjustments for them during the pandemic.
One delegate told the online conference yesterday (Wednesday) that millions of disabled workers were now at risk of redundancy, disadvantage and harassment.
Sian Stockham, a care worker from the public services union UNISON, said a disproportionate number of disabled workers had died from COVID-19 during the crisis.
She said: “This may be because we have been forced to go to work despite the risks, with some employers failing to protect our health and safety.”
She said this included those working with people dying of COVID in care homes.
She said: “Many haven’t had a risk assessment and the provision of [personal protective equipment] has been totally inadequate.
“We have had reports of workers forced to use the same single-use disposable mask for days.”
But she added: “I don’t want us to go back to normal, not if it means disabled workers will still have to struggle to get the reasonable adjustments they need, or if it means care workers are too scared to stand up for their rights to work.”
She said UNISON was calling for “the strongest rights to reasonable adjustments” for disabled workers, and for the right to work from home.
Nikki Fitzsimmons, from the shop workers’ union USDAW, said disabled workers had been “at the sharp end of discrimination and injustice before the pandemic” but the resulting crisis had made this even worse.
She said: “Millions of disabled workers are at risk of redundancy, disadvantage and harassment.
“Thousands of us are fighting for reasonable adjustments to be put into place, but thousands more are working with their unions to right these wrongs and stop them from happening in the first place.”
A food retail manager for 17 years, she was sent home to shield at the start of the crisis after being told she was clinically extremely vulnerable to the virus.
But after three months at home on full pay, she was demoted from manager to general assistant, with her weekly hours cut from 36 to 17 hours, and her take-home pay halved.
She said: “I lost my position, a huge part of my earnings and my confidence.”
In the autumn, she was told to return to work in a petrol filling station and repeatedly had to self-isolate as colleagues tested positive for the virus, before being asked to shield again when the government’s advice changed.
She said: “I’m still at home on statutory sick pay, topped up by 17 hours a week on contractual pay.
“My experience as a disabled worker in this pandemic is not unique, I’m sure of that.”
Elane Heffernan, from the University and College Union, said she could not name a single employer in further and higher education who had “addressed the needs of disabled members at the start of the first lockdown, or even the second or third, actually”.
Claire Stewart, from the NASUWT teachers’ union, told the conference: “Now is the time for unions to remind employers of the fact that a failure to make reasonable adjustments for disabled workers, including adjustment to redundancy criteria and procedures, is a form of unlawful discrimination.
“We must demand that government takes steps to ensure that disabled people are not unlawfully targeted for redundancy and that those who want to work are appropriately supported to do so.”
Ann Galpin, from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), co-chair of the TUC’s disabled workers’ committee, said lobbying by the NUJ and other unions in the creative industries had failed to prevent disabled freelancers being excluded from the government’s income support scheme for self-employed workers.
She said this had “left many of our disabled members without enough income as their work dried up”.
And she said an NUJ survey in January had revealed that eight in 10 disabled members who responded had not had the reasonable adjustments they needed organised through their workplace since the start of the pandemic.
Dave Allan, representative of disabled members on the TUC general council, and Galpin’s co-chair on the disabled workers’ committee, told the conference that – a year on from the start of the pandemic – many disabled workers were still working from home without the reasonable adjustments they needed.
He said: “We have heard that, a year on, some disabled workers are still working off ironing boards or without the specialist software they require. This is not acceptable.
“Workplace protections under the Equality Act have not changed under the pandemic.
“Employers need to meet their legal duties and put in place the adjustments workers need to do their jobs.
“Our members should not dread going into work because they believe they are being set up to fail.”
But he also said that there had been a “home working revolution” for disabled people, even though they had been told for years that this was not possible, and that this “must not fade away when the pandemic is past”.
Allan said that employers must “put in place and keep in place members’ reasonable adjustments, including home working, and we must ensure home working is at the worker’s request and not the employer’s demands”.
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said disabled workers who were having to shield from the virus should have the right to furlough – where the government pays a portion of their monthly wages if there is no work for them to do during lockdown – and not rely on “the whim of their employer”.
O’Grady said that “they have the right as a worker to protect themselves and make that judgement themselves”.
She also called for all workers to have the right to work from home.
She said: “We’ve shown that it can be done. Give it to workers as a right. Or let’s claim that right for ourselves.”
In a statement issued ahead of the conference, the disabled workers’ committee pointed to official figures which showed that redundancy rates had been 62 per cent higher for disabled workers than their non-disabled peers.
The committee said other figures showed disabled workers were overrepresented in insecure work, while they were “bearing a disproportionate burden in keeping the country running during the current crisis… working long hours to keep shelves stocked, hospitals clean and goods delivered to those who can’t leave their homes”.
It called on the government to take measures to protect disabled workers, including banning zero hours contracts, guaranteeing all workers employment rights from day one of their employment, bringing in mandatory reporting by employers on their disability pay gap, and ensuring that disabled people are not unlawfully targeted for redundancy.
Earlier, tributes were paid by the conference to Seán McGovern, who until his death last May had co-chaired the disabled workers’ committee.
Allan said he had been “one of the true heroes of both the trade union movement and the disabled people’s movement, and he effortlessly brought the two together”.
He said: “He was a tireless champion of disabled people.
“His passion, dedication and strategic insight will be sorely missed, and so will his sense of humour, his flawless style, and the grace with which he conducted himself.”
O’Grady said McGovern had been “a good friend” and a “kind and decent man”, but also an “incredibly principled and inspirational champion for disabled workers”.
11 March 2021
Disabled peer secures victory over government on domestic abuse bill
A disabled peer has inflicted a heavy defeat on the government over its refusal to extend the rights of disabled survivors of domestic abuse through new legislation.
Baroness [Jane] Campbell secured cross-party backing for her amendments to the government’s domestic abuse bill when they were debated during its report stage on Monday.
The amendments mean that measures in the bill cover abuse not just by family members and partners but also paid care workers and personal assistants, and friends and neighbours who carry out unpaid caring duties.
The bill includes measures to create a statutory definition of domestic abuse, to establish a domestic abuse commissioner, and to place a duty on local authorities in England to provide support to survivors of domestic abuse and their children in refuges and other safe accommodation.
A vote on one of the amendments proposed by Baroness Campbell was won by 318 votes to 234, with the other two accepted by peers without a vote.
Despite the vote, the amendments will still need to be approved by MPs when the bill returns to the House of Commons*.
In all, 13 cross-party peers spoke in favour of the amendments proposed by Baroness Campbell, with only the Home Office minister Baroness Williams speaking against them.
Baroness Campbell told fellow peers that to deny disabled people protection from the new legislation would be “wholly unjust and discriminatory”.
She said that the “vast majority” of carers were “caring, compassionate and utterly loyal” but that in a small number of cases this was not the case.
She said: “Domestic abuse is not limited to family members or sexual partners. Disabled people of any age can be abused by those on whose care they rely.
“These relationships often involve an imbalance of power and are just as susceptible to abuse as those between family members or partners.”
She said she remembered a “haunting” example of abuse brought to her when she was chief executive of the National Centre for Independent Living.
A disabled man without speech, who used a communication board, had told her how it was “regularly removed from reach so that his carer was not interrupted”.
She added: “He was too afraid to complain because, as he put it, of the ‘likely consequences’.”
She said evidence “clearly demonstrates that such abuse continues today”.
Another disabled crossbench peer, Baroness [Tanni] Grey-Thompson, who has helped lead the attempts to amend the bill, said: “Including this here will help with the wider understanding of the scale of the abuse against disabled people, but it is also important for the individuals who are experiencing it, if and when they seek support.
“I worry that, if disabled people are not included in this legislation, they will fall through the net of reporting and of subsequent support and it will push them into greater peril.”
She joined Baroness Campbell in praising the lobbying efforts of the user-led organisation Stay Safe East, which works with disabled survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, hate crime and other forms of abuse.
She added: “Given the significant number of disabled people impacted by domestic abuse, it is imperative that the amendment be accepted.”
The disabled Liberal Democrat peer Baroness [Sal] Brinton also backed the amendments.
She said: “The problem with private care at home is that often it is not visible at all. That is why these amendments are so important.
“The bill needs to understand that the relationship between disabled people and their personal carers is akin to the familial and relationship definitions used elsewhere in domestic abuse legislation.”
The disabled Conservative peer Lord Shinkwin praised the “practical, common sense set of amendments”.
He said the government needed to ensure that disabled people are “equally protected from abuse in the domestic setting.
“That equal treatment needs to be based on a simple recognition that disability, especially when an impairment makes a disabled person reliant on the carer or personal assistant, also makes them vulnerable to domestic abuse by their carer or personal assistant.”
But even though no peer spoke against the amendments, Baroness Williams insisted that they “would have detrimental effects on the overall understanding of domestic abuse and the complexities of the familial and intimate partner relationships that domestic abuse is understood to encompass”.
She said they would mean the legislation would “include a much wider range of connections within health and social care settings, which are covered by other legislation, and would confuse the meaning of domestic abuse”.
And she said it would mean “diluting and stretching the focus of the domestic abuse commissioner”, while the government would have to “reset and reassess much of the work we are doing to prepare for implementing the bill and developing a new domestic abuse strategy”.
Baroness Williams said that protection from the kind of abuse raised by Baroness Campbell was offered by existing legislation, such as the Care Act 2014 and the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.
Baroness Campbell said she was “deeply disappointed” by the minister’s response, which suggested the government “simply do not understand the nature of domestic abuse experienced by disabled people”.
She said the amendments would not dilute the bill but would strengthen it, “because it will include those who are, at this moment in time, being domestically abused because they rely on another human being for their care”.
She said: “It is not comfortable to think about the domestic abuse of disabled people within the intimate setting of the home – but it takes place.
“Acknowledge it we must, and we must develop a solid way to address it.”
Baroness Campbell had said earlier: “So often when disabled people fight for their civil and human rights, we are told that our demands would open the floodgates to unmanageable litigation.
“It has happened at every stage of the campaign for disability rights legislation. This is not the place to repeat that exercise.”
After the debate, she told Disability News Service: “I would like to urge the Commons to seriously consider the inclusion of disabled people and carers in this flagship domestic abuse bill, when it comes to them at the end of the month.
“Members of the Lords have carried out thorough consultation with disability groups, instructed an opinion from highly specialised disability discrimination and social care lawyers endorsing the intent of my amendments and garnered cross-party support.
“Surely this should be taken very seriously by MPs. It’s up to them now.”
*Other amendments proposed by Baroness Campbell were debated last night (Wednesday) and would have made similar changes in relation to controlling or coercive behaviour under the Serious Crime Act 2015. But she withdrew them because of the risk that they would jeopardise another amendment that she and Baroness Grey-Thompson supported and which the government had backed. Because of the government’s refusal to back her amendments, she said she had “no alternative” other than to “vey sadly” withdraw them.
11 March 2021
Law change will allow Deaf jurors… after two decades of campaigning
A leading Deaf campaigner has welcomed the government’s “long, long overdue” announcement that it will finally change the law to allow Deaf people who use British Sign Language (BSL) to serve on juries.
David Buxton has spent a decade campaigning and lobbying ministers and other parliamentarians to persuade them to change the law.
Now the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office have announced that their new police, crime, sentencing and courts bill includes measures that will allow profoundly deaf people to sit on juries in England and Wales for the first time.
The measure is part of a bill that ministers say will “crack down on crime” and “keep our streets safe”, and which includes controversial measures on the right to protest, but which also includes measures they say will produce a “smarter, fairer justice system”.
One of those measures is to allow BSL-users to serve as jurors, after more than two decades of campaigning by Deaf people.
Common law rules currently ban the presence of a “stranger” in the jury deliberation room, but this will now be changed, with the bill introducing measures that will allow a BSL interpreter into the room.
Under the changes, interpreters will have to sign a confidentiality agreement that states their obligation to remain impartial and not pass on any discussions that take place in the jury room.
The Ministry of Justice said the change would open up jury service to more than 80,000 BSL-users across England and Wales.
Buxton, a former chief executive of the British Deaf Association (BDA) and now chief executive of the disabled people’s organisation Action on Disability, has been campaigning and lobbying ministers since 2011 to make the change in the law.
He said he was “very pleased” that the government was finally acting.
He was part of a Ministry of Justice working group that discussed the issue during the 2010 coalition government, which led to a promise to review the legislation after the 2015 election.
But no action had been taken by 2017, when Buxton himself was called up for jury service.
When he attended the court and said that he was Deaf and would be able to take part using a BSL interpreter, he was informed that he was not required.
He later launched a claim against the government for a judicial review of the ban, but he agreed to his legal action being put on hold after the Ministry of Justice said it would look into the matter further.
By the following year, no progress had been made, so he began lobbying parliamentarians and the government.
Jeff McWhinney, his predecessor as BDA chief executive, had himself been told by a crown court judge in 1999 that he could not serve as a juror because the law prevented him bringing an interpreter – a “13th person” – into the jury room.
The Labour government also said it was considering a change in the law at the time.
Buxton said this week: “It’s now 2021, and finally, a new day dawns with this change to common law enabling Deaf sign language users to be part of the justice system.
“This is long, long overdue but very welcome.”
He praised those who had supported the campaign, including his solicitor Louise Whitfield, as well as Professor Jemma Napier, Matthew Banks and Linda Richards, and he also thanked justice secretary Robert Buckland.
But he stressed that the legal change was only “one more small step towards our goal of a British Sign Language Act in order to achieve true access and equality”.
Buckland said: “Disability should not be a barrier to people carrying out this most important civic duty.
“I am delighted we can open up jury service to many thousands more people and ensure our justice system becomes as accessible and inclusive as possible.”
11 March 2021
Peterloo memorial branded ‘million-pound embarrassment’ after latest access failure
A memorial to the victims of the Peterloo massacre has been branded a “million-pound embarrassment” after Manchester City Council failed again to suggest a way to make it fully accessible to disabled people.
One disabled activist told an online public meeting that the Peterloo memorial, unveiled in August 2019 for the 200th anniversary of the massacre*, was “a folly which shames Manchester and opens the city up to derision and mockery”.
She branded it a “physical manifestation of inequality, exclusion and prejudice”.
The council promised in August 2019 to make the memorial accessible, following a grassroots campaign led by disabled activists furious at the decision to fund a monument that was designed to be used as a speaking platform but was completely inaccessible to many people.
This week, the council admitted that it had made mistakes in failing to give enough “time and consideration… to the original concept design and the emerging accessibility issues as the plans evolved”.
The council suggested at last week’s meeting that its preferred option was now to close the memorial to the public for all but one day every year, and then install a temporary ramp on that one day that would allow those with mobility impairments to reach the top level.
The meeting, organised by the council, heard from several disabled activists who have campaigned for the memorial – which was designed to be used as a platform for speakers and demonstrators, mirroring those who spoke during the protest in 1819 that led to the massacre – to be made accessible.
Dr Morag Rose, an artist, activist and lecturer in human geography at the University of Liverpool, told the council that a temporary ramp one day a year “stigmatises and blames disabled people for your failures”.
She said Peterloo had become “a symbol of working-class struggles, of the fight for equality, participation, democracy and inclusion” and that it was “beyond irony” that the memorial instead “embodies inequality, exclusion and segregation”.
She said: “Shame on everyone who failed to notice, or failed to listen or failed to speak up when we told you a flight of steps was an insult and a mockery.
“Shame on all who colluded or hoped the problem would go away. It has not. We have not.
“During the pandemic, disabled people have been made abundantly aware that our lives are perceived as less worthy than others.
“We knew it in our bones already, of course, but public discourse has made this more blatant than ever.
“The memorial as it stands embodies the belief that disabled people are not worthy, do not matter. It reminds us of that prejudice every time we encounter it.”
And she said it was “a folly which shames Manchester and opens the city up to derision and mockery” and was a “physical manifestation of inequality, exclusion and prejudice”.
Flick Harris, chair of Manchester Disabled People’s Access Group, said this week that she and other disabled campaigners wanted the council to look at other options, such as a permanent “glazed” ramp that would look less intrusive than other access solutions.
She said: “Their proposal is to have a horrible ramp which obscures everything but only have it there as a temporary ramp for one day a year and then close it for everybody for 364 days a year.
“We are all against it. It is ridiculous. We recognise the importance and the value of the memorial, but because the design is so inaccessible they are going to have to make modifications to the design to make it accessible to everybody.”
She said the council must also address the lack of accessible information around the memorial.
Dennis Queen, a committee member of Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, said the memorial had become a “million-pound embarrassment” and that the council’s solution of one-day-a-year access “just feels wrong”.
She said: “Disabled people in Manchester have been campaigning for access to the city for 40 years.”
She said disabled people “got creative and found solutions” when faced with inaccessible public transport in the 1980s, and they could do the same again now.
She said: “We don’t want to stop other people using it.
“It was going to be something that the city could be proud of, but now it has become a big embarrassment to us and the council.”
A Manchester City Council spokesperson said: “The purpose of the meeting was not to present people with a fait accompli but to update them on where this issue was up to, including some of the challenges around solutions, and to hear their views and ideas.
“We will now take these away and further reflect on potential solutions. At this point, no decisions have been taken.”
Asked about the reaction to the “one-day-a-year” solution, he said the council “recognises the views which were strongly expressed on this matter by some of the attendees of the meeting and will take them on board as we consider the way forward”.
He said the council had learned lessons from its past mistakes and was using them to “inform current and future projects” and “ensure inclusive design is at their heart from the outset and that all of our disabled residents, visitors and workers can experience the city accessibly and on equal terms.
“We acknowledge the frustration that despite our best endeavours, and those of architects working on our behalf, it is has not yet been possible to come up with a satisfactory solution for the Peterloo Memorial given where we are with the project.”
He said the council had not gone back on its word to make the memorial fully accessible, but had yet to find a solution.
He said: “We have carefully considered seven options for a permanent ramp or lift but due to the constraints of the site none have proved feasible.
“Each would have either had an overbearing impact, obscuring the details of the people who died, or required the permanent use of a significant amount of extra land owned by Manchester Central** and used during major events there.”
*On 16 August 1819, paramilitary and military forces attacked more than 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters in Manchester, which led to 18 deaths and an estimated 700 serious injuries, in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre
**The memorial is situated outside the Manchester Central conference centre
11 May 2021
Errol Graham family hope to appeal ‘baffling’ ruling on DWP benefit death
The family of a disabled man who starved to death after his benefits were wrongly removed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) hope to appeal a court’s “baffling” ruling that it was “reasonable” to take such action.
The high court last week rejected a claim that DWP had acted unlawfully by not making further enquiries about Errol Graham’s mental health before it cut off his employment and support allowance (ESA) in October 2017.
It also rejected the claim that DWP’s safeguarding policy was unlawful.
The judicial review claim was brought on behalf of the family by Alison Turner, the fiancée of Graham’s son.
Graham had missed a work capability assessment (WCA) and had failed to respond when DWP tried to contact him by phone and in person, while he had cut off all ties with his family, who had no idea that his benefits had been removed.
DWP went ahead and stopped his ESA without trying to contact his family or public bodies, even though he had been receiving incapacity benefit, and then ESA, for many years as a result of enduring mental distress.
Turner’s lawyers had argued that it was unlawful to expect claimants like Errol Graham to show they had “good cause” to miss a WCA or fail to complete an ESA questionnaire, and that DWP should change its safeguarding policy to ensure that it did more to look into cases where claimants with significant mental distress were not engaging with them.
The court heard that DWP had now changed its policy so that its decision-makers must consider contacting a next-of-kin or other agencies, and must hold a case conference, after two failed safeguarding visits to the claimant’s home.
Errol Graham’s family believe much more still needs to be done.
But the judge, Mr Justice Bourne, said this was “a significant improvement to the policy”.
He added: “It should help to prevent tragic outcomes like that of Mr Graham, though I cannot say what if any effect it would have had in his case.”
He also said in his ruling that DWP had not been aware that Errol Graham had been sectioned in 2015.
The judge said it was “reasonable” for a public body in DWP’s position to be “satisfied on the basis of the enquiries made that it possessed the information necessary for its decision”, and that it was lawful for DWP to place the burden of proof on the claimant.
He added: “It conducted the inquiries which it considered reasonably necessary to find out whether there was a ‘good cause’ for his failure to attend the assessment, and Mr Graham sadly did not engage at all.”
He dismissed the family’s judicial review claim.
Turner said she had been “stunned” by the ruling.
She said: “It’s almost blaming Errol for his own death.”
She said DWP should have contacted the police to carry out a welfare check on him when it heard that he had not been engaging with his GP surgery.
She said: “They would have found Errol and I don’t doubt they would have sectioned him.
“People are saying the judgement doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t. I just find it extremely baffling.
“You can’t expect Errol to understand what was being asked of him. He wasn’t going to open those letters.
“He was sectioned [in 2015] because he wasn’t deemed safe or capable of caring for himself.”
She added: “I am hoping there is enough to go for an appeal. The law is there to protect people, not put them at risk.”
Errol Graham’s body was discovered on 20 June 2018 when bailiffs arrived at his Nottingham council flat to evict him for non-payment of rent.
When his body was found, he weighed just four-and-a-half stone, there was no food in his flat and no credit on his gas or electricity meters, while an unsent letter to DWP was found which pleaded: “Please judge me fairly.”
Tessa Gregory, a partner at the family’s solicitors, Leigh Day, said: “We are deeply disappointed by the judgment which fails to ensure the DWP takes simple steps to protect the lives of vulnerable benefit claimants.
“We are considering an appeal and Errol’s family will continue to fight for a welfare system that supports rather than endangers lives.”
A DWP spokesperson said: “Our sincere condolences remain with Mr Graham’s family.
“While we welcome this judgment, we continue to work to improve the service that we provide to our most vulnerable claimants.”
11 March 2021
News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com
