Disabled people’s organisations tell government: Big disability charities are ‘actively harmful’ to our movement
Disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) have made a plea to the government to listen to their “authentic” voices rather than disability charities that are not led by disabled people, which they say are “actively harmful” to their movement.
In a response to the government’s consultation on developing a new relationship with civil society, DPO Forum England and Disability Rights UK (DR UK) accuse non-disabled-led charities of seizing their language on empowerment but failing to share their access to ministers and other decision-makers.
They say the charities “financially benefit from talking about our oppression” and that the government should instead prioritise the “authentic” views of DPOs and ensure that “those directly impacted by these issues have real authority in the decision-making process”.
They tell the government in the response: “Non-Disabled People Led Organisations are actively harmful to DPOs and the Disabled people’s movement.
“They appropriate our language about empowerment yet do not share their access to decision-makers or people in power with us.
“They take up the majority of funding going into the disability space whilst not letting Disabled people lead their organisations, campaigns and policy work.
“This perpetuates the paternalistic and charitable marginalisation of Disabled people.”
They add: “Despite our 45-year track record in advancing disability rights and systemic change, we face substantial challenges in securing meaningful engagement and funding compared to disability charities not led by disabled people.
“These charities, often with larger budgets and established government ties, systematically overshadow our efforts, perpetuating a cycle in which non-disabled voices influence disability policy and community work.”
When it comes to government funding, they say, there were 1,457 government contracts awarded to just nine disability charities that were not led by disabled people in 2022-23, reaching a total value of more than £460 million.
This compares to just 148 contracts awarded to 90 DPOs, worth a total value of just £12.5 million in the same year.
The government consultation, which closed last week, was aimed at securing the views of voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises on the government’s framework for a new Civil Society Covenant, which it hopes will improve collaboration between the government and civil society.
The forum and DR UK say in their response that they want the new covenant to provide a “strengthened mandate” in policy consultation and decision-making for those organisations that are led by members of the communities they represent, including DPOs.
DPOs should be “explicitly” prioritised in government consultations, decision-making processes and funding, they say, and provided with the funding they need to cover their accessibility and disability-related costs in these processes.
But they also say that the government should “deprioritise” disability charities that are not led by disabled people.
And they call for the same emphasis on engagement with DPOs to apply to local authorities.
They also want the government to incorporate into the covenant its obligations under article 4.3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which states that governments should “closely consult with and actively involve” disabled people through their representative organisations when developing disability-related laws and policies.
The forum’s membership includes DPOs from across England, including DR UK, Inclusion London, Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, Shaping Our Lives, The Alliance for Inclusive Education, Disabled People Against Cuts, Buckinghamshire Disability Service, and British Deaf Association.
Professor Peter Beresford, co-chair of the national service-user network Shaping Our Lives, told Disability News Service that it was vital that the government gave DPOs the funding they needed – and the “credibility and respect” – rather than funding disability organisations not led by disabled people.
He said these big charities “would probably have a big struggle to justify speaking for us but they’ve never struggled, and they’ve never justified stealing our voices.
“These are difficult days, with a Labour government that still needs to learn the lesson people voted against the Tories not for a continuation of its ideology but for democratic change.
“But we have right and rights on our side and as our numbers grow, we will get there.”
19 December 2024
New government figures show key policy at heart of disability employment strategy ‘will not work’
A key treatment that ministers have placed at the heart of their strategy for pushing people with mental distress and ill-health into paid work has only a tiny impact on the probability of them securing jobs, government figures have shown.
Disabled people’s mental health groups say the figures destroy the government’s case for “using mental health interventions as a stick to enforce work” and have called on ministers to rethink their “harmful” disability employment strategy.
The government placed an expansion of NHS Talking Therapies – which already costs hundreds of millions of pounds a year – at the centre of last month’s Get Britain Working white paper.
The white paper announced: “To tackle poor mental health, the leading driver of ill health-related inactivity, the government has committed to continuing to expand access to NHS Talking Therapies for adults with common mental health conditions in England.”
The white paper claimed that “extensive literature and studies” showed that NHS Talking Therapies improved employment outcomes.
The last Conservative government had also placed a massive expansion of NHS Talking Therapies at the heart of its own Back to Work Plan last year.
Last month, the new Labour government’s white paper mentioned a forthcoming evaluation of the impact of NHS Talking Therapies.
But when that research was published last week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), there was no mention of it on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) website, and no press release issued by work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall.
What the ONS research showed – based on analysis of nearly 600,000 people* with “common mental disorders like anxiety and depression” who completed NHS talking therapy – was that this treatment had almost no impact on the probability of being in work after seven years.
After three years, there was an increase of just 1.4 percentage points in the probability of someone being a paid employee, and after seven years that had increased to only 1.5 percentage points.
To qualify as being a “paid employee” in the study, someone only needed to have earned more than £0 in a month.
After three years, the average increase in monthly earnings for someone who had completed the treatment was just £17.
The impact of the therapy was even lower for disabled people who had not been working before the therapy began, with the probability of being a paid employee even decreasing in the first couple of years after treatment, and then only rising by 0.1 percentage points by the sixth year, although it increased by 0.6 percentage points after seven years.
The research also found that average monthly earnings fell after talking therapy for disabled people who had not been working before the treatment started, dropping by nearly £16 in the first year and as much as £23 a month by the seventh year.
Amy Wells, senior communications and membership manager for National Survivor User Network, said: “It becomes ever more transparent and worrying that our government is intent on pushing disabled people — and those living with mental ill-health — back into work, in place of genuine, comprehensive support.
“Little regard is being paid to whether it is possible or beneficial for disabled people to get ‘back into work’, furthering the rhetoric that people are not valuable beyond their contributions to the economy.
“The majority of investment for these plans is being funnelled into talking therapies, with the expectation of its ability to ‘support’ people back to work, which has now been shown to have a very insignificant impact on individual employment status.
“What this new data shows is that the government’s plans are not only harmful, but that they also will not work.
“We find these developments incredibly disappointing and call for a rethink of the government’s strategy around disability employment.”
Rick Burgess, a spokesperson for the grassroots, user-led mental health group Recovery in the Bin, said the ONS data “destroys the government’s case for using mental health interventions as a stick to enforce work” which instead was “just a fig leaf for cuts”.
He said: “The tiny statistical positive effect does not justify the polluting of healthcare with coercive work requirements.”
He also pointed to the ONS research stating that only Asian and white ethnic groups saw statistically significant positive impacts from the therapy on their monthly pay and chances of being in paid work, which he said shows the policy is “racist” and that DWP is “proposing a policy that discriminates”.
And he said there was “growing scepticism of the efficacy and suitability of cognitive behavioural therapy**” within the talking therapies programme.
He said: “This leaves Liz Kendall yet again claiming policy success while evidence proves the opposite, and trying to hide £3 billion in cuts.
“There is simply no future in the DWP’s approach, yet they flog this dead horse because the suffering is borne not by them, but by us, as the prevention of future deaths reports mount up.”
Asked if the ONS figures destroyed Kendall’s strategy of placing an ever-increasing reliance on talking therapies to push people with mental ill-health into work, and whether the tiny increases reported by ONS justified the substantial investment in NHS Talking Therapies, a DWP spokesperson said: “We are confident NHS Talking Therapies is a beneficial service that has a positive impact on those at risk of falling out of work due to ill health, with several studies demonstrating its health and economic benefits.
“Along with the expansion of Talking Therapies to an extra 380,000 patients, our £240 million Get Britain Working white paper gives local leaders the power they need to join up local work, health and skills support so more people can get into work.”
DWP also pointed to the government’s plans to invest £26 million in opening new mental health crisis centres as part of last month’s budget.
*Individuals referred to NHS Talking Therapies between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2020; who attended at least one therapy session; were considered to be a “clinical case” for anxiety, depression or both; were between the ages of 25 and 60 years on the day of the referral; and were resident in England
**One of the most common talking therapies used in the programme
19 December 2024
New research exposes ‘shocking and eye-opening’ levels of bullying of universal credit claimants
New unpublished research has exposed the impact of “shocking and eye-opening” levels of bullying and systematic mistakes on disabled people forced to rely on the universal credit working-age benefits system.
Reports from focus groups hosted by Inclusion Scotland in October add to growing evidence of the significant and harmful flaws of universal credit, how it is operated by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and its strong links with at least three suicides.
Dr Rianna Price, policy and research officer with Inclusion Scotland, who led the focus groups, said two of the participants had spoken of how they had planned to take their own lives because they felt “so overwhelmed” by the universal credit process.
She said they “didn’t see a way out, and they had been treated like a burden, treated as if they were just parasites leeching off the state”.
She told Disability News Service (DNS): “The issues that people spoke about were in some cases very shocking and eye-opening to the levels of systematic error and bullying that are apparent in the Department for Work and Pensions.”
One claimant with a health condition, who already had a part-time job but was using universal credit to top-up their wages, spoke of how their mental health had deteriorated because of harassment from a work coach who bullied them into applying for other jobs they were hugely over-qualified for, and told them they faced sanctions if they failed to do so.
They said the work coach had appeared to be “more interested in getting them off benefits than actually helping them”.
An autistic claimant had spoken of the constant, repeated messages sent to claimants through universal credit’s online journal.
Price said that every time this claimant received a notification, they had to log on to their journal immediately, and “the constant time pressure made them feel incredibly anxious”.
She said: “Every time they saw it pop up, and usually nine times out of 10, it was a completely benign message… they would be panicked that they had done something wrong, or that they were going to get their money taken off them.”
But the claimants also told Inclusion Scotland that work coaches who replied to questions through the journal often did not know the correct rules, so a claimant might receive different answers to their question from different work coaches, or even the same work coach.
One of the claimants had been accused of fraud, before DWP admitted it had made an error.
Price told DNS: “The majority of them had incredibly negative associations with universal credit, that all stemmed from not necessarily the system itself, although that didn’t meet their needs, but feeling as if they were being targeted and criticised, bullied, because their needs were complex.”
The focus groups were carried out in October, and were carried out online and in-person, with a total of 16 disabled claimants taking part.
Price said she was “incredibly concerned” by what she had heard during the focus groups.
One of the claimants, who had fibromyalgia, spoke of being forced to attend a face-to-face work capability assessment because the contractor would not carry it out over the phone.
When they arrived, they were told the lift was out of order, and they were forced to climb stairs to an assessment room.
After the assessment, said Price, “they were so fatigued that they fell off a chair and their partner had to carry them out of the assessment building, and they couldn’t get out of bed for a month while they recovered their energy”.
She said most of the focus group participants had reported “negative interactions” with a work coach, while only three had spoken of having any positive relationships with any of their work coaches.
Price said that, if she was able to speak directly to Sir Stephen Timms, Labour’s minister for disability and social security, she would tell him that “the current system is not fit for purpose, and it’s not just the systems, it’s not just the job centres, it’s the attitudes towards people who need benefits”.
She added: “So many of [the focus group participants] were aware that this was a political choice that people in power were making.
“Not just about how much they should receive, but also about how it was framed, and how they were kind of labelled as scroungers.
“Most of them wanted to work, they wanted to find a way, but they felt as if it was employers that were putting up barriers, rather than them not being able to find work.”
In a blog for Inclusion Scotland, Price wrote: “Universal Credit in Scotland is a punitive system that subjects claimants to relentless scrutiny and impossible standards.
“This impacts every aspect of their lives, with decisions made by the DWP affecting mental and physical health.
“The system not only fails to support disabled people who wish to work but also disregards those who cannot.”
The focus groups were the first phase of a five-year, €3 million research project led by King’s College London (KCL) and seven other research organisations, and in collaboration with seven organisations that work with claimants in the UK, Spain, Hungary, Norway and Estonia, including Inclusion Scotland.
The project is funded by the European Research Council, and led by Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger, from the Centre for Society and Mental Health and KCL’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.
The research is comparing the experiences of claimants in different countries, examining the impacts of these experiences on mental health and work, and looking at how policies influence these experiences.
When the study was announced last year, Professor Baumberg Geiger said: “To date, most research has looked at whether these systems reduce poverty and encourage people to work.
“These are important, but from speaking to claimants, we know that other things matter too – whether benefits provide dignity, security and feel fair; or whether people feel stigmatised, insecure, and unjustly treated.”
19 December 2024
Streeting set to announce next stage in long-term social care plan within weeks
The government is set to announce the next stage in developing its 10-year plan for social care within weeks, the health and social care secretary has told MPs.
Wes Streeting told members of the Commons health and social care committee yesterday (Wednesday) that he planned to publish further details on how the government would approach devising a long-term solution to the social care crisis “in the new year”.
In July, research by Disability Law Service found that disabled people across England were continuing to face unlawful discrimination and inequality on an “unparalleled” scale due to “unjust” social care charging policies.
Days later, the new Labour chancellor, Rachel Reeves, told MPs that it would “not be possible” to take forward reforms to adult social care charging that had been repeatedly delayed by successive Conservative governments.
The reforms – although widely seen as regressive and unfair – would have introduced a lifetime cap of £86,000 on how much anyone pays for social care in England.
The reforms were based on some of the recommendations made by the 2011 Dilnot commission on care funding.
Streeting said yesterday that there was “no solution to the crisis in the NHS that doesn’t also involve a solution in social care”, while social care “is important in and of itself, whether that’s supporting disabled people of all ages, or supporting people in later life”.
He said the new government had taken “significant and important steps” in its first five months in office, including measures in the employment rights bill that will “deliver not just better pay for care workers” but also “better career progression and recognition”.
He also said the budget had provided “the biggest expansion of carer’s allowance since the 1970s”, an increase of £86 million in spending on the disabled facilities grant, and an extra £680 million ringfenced funding for social care.
Streeting said these measures do not “represent the solution to the care crisis”, but he added: “We’ve been in government for five months. I don’t think those four things are a bad start, but there is more to do.”
He said he accepted that, without government action, there would be “continued mismanaged decline”.
Streeting said the government needed a 10-year plan for social care to sit alongside the 10-year plan for health and that he would be “setting out in the new year how we will build that plan”.
He claimed there was cross-party “ambition” on social care, with all parties saying they wanted to “work together to fix the care crisis and that’s what we want to do”.
And he said he wanted “all parties in parliament to be… engaged and involved in that, as I think that’s an opportunity to build consensus”.
But asked by Labour’s Josh Fenton-Glynn if the government would be “setting out a comprehensive plan”, or merely announcing a new commission to examine the social care crisis, Streeting said only: “It means we’re setting out how we’ll go about building the 10-year plan in the new year.”
19 December 2024
Disabled woman says council helped drive her to suicide attempts over ‘impossible’ care assessment deadlines
A local authority’s actions helped drive a disabled woman to attempt to take her own life, after it imposed an “impossible” two-week deadline upon her as part of a discriminatory social care assessment process.
Clare*, from Cambridgeshire, who has multiple health conditions, including a visual impairment, was told she needed to fill out an inaccessible form as part of a financial assessment.
She was told that if she wanted to keep more than £28 of her £110.40 a week daily living personal independence payment (PIP) she would have to provide detailed receipts, invoices and figures.
But she was given only two weeks to fill out the form and provide the evidence, even though council staff were aware of her history of mental distress and self-harm.
Her case is just the latest to expose the financial hardship and emotional harm caused by cash-strapped councils charging working-age disabled people for their care and support.
Cambridgeshire County Council had asked Clare to provide details of her disability-related expenditure (DRE), disability-related costs that can be considered when assessing how much a disabled person can afford to pay in care charges.
Even though she sent digital evidence showing DRE of thousands of pounds over the previous year, the council insisted she still had to complete its inaccessible form.
Because of her visual impairment, she needed a support worker to help her put the evidence together and fill in the council’s form, which had to be printed out and filled in by hand, and she found the process “too overwhelming and distressing to do quickly”.
She also found there was not enough space on the form to include more than a tiny proportion of all her disability-related expenses.
The distress caused by the council’s actions has now triggered two suicide attempts in the last few weeks, she says.
Now she wants to see all local authorities introduce safeguarding measures that would ensure they pay particular care when dealing with financial assessments of disabled people with a history of mental distress or self-harm, and others concerned about the assessment, and give them at least three months to complete the form and provide the necessary evidence.
The council was aware of her history of significant mental distress and suicide attempts when it imposed its original two-week deadline for her to provide detailed proof of her DRE in early September, she says.
But for the last three months, the council has refused to allow her a more reasonable deadline, other than allowing her a couple of short extensions.
It did offer support from her social worker to help her fill out the form, but Clare said this would have risked a conflict of interest as the social worker had previously dismissed many of the expenses she was hoping to claim for.
The whole three months was spent “panicking” about the “impossible deadlines”, she said.
She had asked to be warned when the last extension was due to expire, so she could request another one, but she said the council instead went ahead and disregarded all her DRE and charged her the full £138 a week – more than she receives in PIP – as a contribution towards a package of just 14 hours of council-funded support.
Clare said: “I told my social worker how suicidal it was making me and how I couldn’t sleep and was having panic attacks.”
The receipts she has collected – with the assistance of her support workers, who she has had to pay for this work – show she is spending far more every month trying to address the disability-related needs she faces in her daily life than she receives in benefits, the only income she receives.
She said: “My income is not enough to live on, really, but social services want all the PIP and a huge amount of what’s left as well.
“I have begged and pleaded with them, but they have no mercy on disabled people.”
The full-time university student is being left increasingly in debt by the council’s continuing refusal to make reasonable adjustments for her, and she has recently had to apply for another credit card so she can afford to eat and continue to study.
She has had to spend thousands of pounds in the last year on disability-related expenditure such as humidifiers, microwave steriliser bags, vinyl gloves, water filters and distillers, wash cloths, heat masks for warm compresses, citric acid for descaling and cleaning dehumidifiers, taxi receipts, supplements, food deliveries, as well as purchases of specialist headphones, screen protectors and audio equipment that she needs because of her visual impairment.
Clare told the council that its deadline “set me up to fail and sets me up for further reduced quality of life where I would have another appeal taking over my limited time and forcing me to engage with disability rights advice, legal rights advice, and providing mountains of evidence to overturn a discriminatory decision”.
Her ordeal has convinced her that every council should introduce a system that adds a marker on the files of disabled people who receive care and support and need “additional support” or express distress about the process.
This would impose a duty on the council to ensure the disabled person was able to cope with the financial assessment process and the “overwhelming, distressing form” and offer them support and the necessary deadline extensions.
She said: “I think the additional support marker would mean fewer people would try to harm themselves or take their own lives and would be less likely to be forced to refuse care because of the unaffordability of care charges.
“In a fair world, councils would not be charging vulnerable disabled people for care.
“At the very least, they could harm a few less people through denial of care and driving them into unbearable poverty and debt using social care charges.”
Anne Pridmore, founder and director of Being the Boss, who has provided advice to Clare, said: “Disabled people do not want to be living in a negative frame of mind.
“It accentuates your impairment if you’re having to provide evidence to support your claim.
“It’s far, far too complicated.”
Pridmore, who is running free online workshops for users of personal assistants with fellow disabled expert Iggy Patel, through the Bringing Us Together network, said: “Most disabled people are stressed out anyway with all they are going through.
“Everything you buy to do with disability is expensive so to have to prove that you’re using X number of incontinence pads a week in order to claim [DRE], that’s very, very stressful.”
She said the experiences of people who have been at their workshops showed the concerns about the DRE process that Clare has raised were “really widespread”.
Cambridgeshire County Council refused to discuss Clare’s case, even though she had provided permission for it to do so.
Instead, it said in a statement: “We understand how stressful and challenging financial assessments around social care can be, which is why the council’s adult social care team work with individuals on care and support options.
“Whilst we don’t comment on individual cases, the team always look at ways they can support and be more flexible to meet a person’s particular needs.
“Although there is a standard two-week deadline for financial assessment referrals, extensions are often given and other ways to support people are also offered, such as in-person support.
“We continue to work with and support the person to conclude their financial assessment process.”
*Not her real name
Further information on the campaign to end care charging is available here and here and here, and there is guidance on DRE here
The following organisations are among those that could be able to offer support if you have been affected by the issues raised in this article: Samaritans, Papyrus, Mind, SOS Silence of Suicide and Rethink
19 December 2024
Two reports expose serious and critical barriers disabled people still face in their daily lives
Two new reports from organisations founded by disabled entrepreneurs have highlighted some of the “serious” and “critical” barriers disabled people are facing in their daily lives.
The reports were produced by accessible travel company Wheelie Good Travel Company (WGTC) and accessibility information provider AccessAble.
The WGTC report, Disabled Passenger Airport Assistance – The Need to Change, shows many disabled passengers face barriers such as inadequate staff training, inconsistent accessibility infrastructure, shortages of essential equipment, delays in receiving assistance, and safeguarding concerns.
Of 275 respondents to the WGTC survey, 97 per cent of them reported negative experiences while travelling through UK airports.
A major area of concern was in communication, with concerns about the “lack of information, inappropriate and disrespectful language and attitudes towards disabled travellers”, and poor quality information that left them “feeling stressed, anxious, disempowered, abandoned and frustrated”.
Passengers reported being left on a plane for up to three hours after arrival, with no information about the reason for the delay or how long they would have to wait.
One said: “I was left on the plane for over two hours; no-one informed us of how long the delay would be or why. I felt abandoned.”
More than half (53 per cent) of the respondents reported a lack of continuity of airport assistance by providers, ranging from “being abandoned part way through the journey of care” to a “complete breakdown of communication between different agencies”.
Nearly two-fifths (38 per cent) of respondents reported staff being rude or disrespectful to disabled passengers they were assisting, with one reporting being “treated like an inconvenience and a nuisance”.
Among problems with a lack of equipment, survey respondents reported a shortage of wheelchairs, ambulifts (used to take passengers with mobility impairments on and off flights), aisle chairs, hoists and slings.
One in 10 (10 per cent) of the respondents said they had experienced poor manual handling when being transferred between their wheelchairs and their aircraft seat.
And 13 per cent said they had experienced either damage to their wheelchair or mobility equipment or it being lost by the company responsible for baggage handling.
The survey results suggested that the best three airports for providing an acceptable level of assistance were Manchester, Heathrow and Gatwick.
But they also showed Heathrow, Manchester and Gatwick to be the three airports where disabled passengers were most likely to report an unacceptable level of assistance.
The report said this showed the inconsistency in the standard of service provided, causing “anxiety and increased stress” to disabled passengers.
One respondent said: “You never know what standard of assistance to expect and it can vary wildly at the same airport from visit to visit.
“It sometimes feels like a lottery.”
Another said: “When it is good it can be very good and when it is bad it can be very bad.”
The report makes more than 25 recommendations, across communications, equipment, manual handling, loss and damage to equipment, continuity of support through an assistance journey, and staff training.
It concludes that there are “serious issues and concerns about the way airport assistance is currently managed and operated” and “an urgent need to change the current system”.
Jon Fletcher, WGTC’s founder and chief executive and the report’s author, said travelling “should be a seamless experience for everyone”, but the findings show “there is still a long way to go”.
He called on the government, airlines, and airport operators to collaborate on producing “actionable solutions” to the concerns raised in his report.
Meanwhile, AccessAble’s survey has revealed “critical gaps in accessibility information, staff training, and venue practices, all of which contribute to an ongoing barrier to inclusion”.
More than three-quarters (77 per cent) of those who took part in the survey said they had abandoned plans to visit a venue because they could not find information on its accessibility, but almost all of them (96 per cent) said that having this information in advance would make them more likely to visit.
The survey had been open from late 2023 until the middle of this year, and it received more than 1,000 responses, with more than four-fifths (81 per cent) of respondents disabled people.
One in five (18 per cent) of those who took part rated the “disability awareness” of staff at venues as poor or extremely poor, while three-quarters (73 per cent) had had to leave a venue because it was not accessible to them.
Of those who took part in the AccessAble survey, more than half (56 per cent) said they had experienced disability discrimination when visiting a venue, while more than two-thirds (68 per cent) believed non-disabled people were not aware of the barriers that disabled people face.
Dr Gregory Burke, the disabled founder and executive chair of AccessAble, said the survey results “clearly highlight the urgent need for businesses, organisations, and venues to prioritise accessibility”.
He said: “Providing accessible services is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic advantage.
“It can lead to enhanced business outcomes by reaching a larger market, mitigating legal risks, and building stronger customer loyalty.”
19 December 2024
Other disability-related stories covered by mainstream media this week
For almost two decades, passengers at a town’s main railway station have repeatedly been promised lifts – but they have never arrived. Travellers at Luton, named among England’s 10 worst stations in 2009, still face flights of stairs to reach most platforms. Network Rail plans to start preparatory work in the spring but did not know how long the project would take or how much it would cost: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj49d77wpwwo
19 December 2024
News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com
