Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:25 pm on 16 October 2018.
Okay. I was just going to conclude, therefore, by asking you to work with the Assembly Commission to recognise and address barriers to independent living for disabled people identified by, for example, the disabled people seeking to access and attend the Cross-Party Group on Disability, the Cross-Party Group on Neurological Conditions, tomorrow's joint meeting—disability, older people and housing and otherwise, who are finding it—. Well, my staff are finding it next to impossible to get the Commission to provide identified disabled parking spaces for people to remove the barriers to their attending this building, and similar ongoing concerns regarding the ramps outside.
And finally, will you help—and I'll give one example—Flintshire, because I've got some cases I haven't referred to you previously—how to help them better understand what all this means. I'll give you two very quick examples and I'll finish. One: I had a meeting with the chief officer of Flintshire disability forum centre for independent iiving and officers in the council regarding the inability of wheelchair users to access the coastal path. We were told that they would tell us what size wheelchairs we should tell people to have. I suspect that you might recognise that is a gross breach, not only of the social model, but of the Equality Act 2010 and Welsh legislation.
And finally, in this context, a group of autistic adults and children I've been working with for years have been seeking a round-table meeting with Flintshire at a senior level, multidisciplinary, now for over seven months, over 150 days, to discuss the social, psychological and health barriers they're encountering. Because of procrastination, delay and cancellation, that meeting's still not occurred. But we took it up with the chief executive. He blamed the autistic people, who are suffering heightened anxiety, who are suffering meltdown, who are contacting me telling me of their suicidal thoughts because of the crisis they've been pushed into by a failure of a local authority hosting the integrated autism service, who fails to understand what the communication and social needs of autistic people are, and is, therefore, driving a situation in which its own officers are having to cope with situations that the chief executive then uses as an excuse not to meet the people who have the answers.