7. Statement by the Leader of the House and Chief Whip: Action on Disability: The Right to Independent Living

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 16 October 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:50, 16 October 2018

Thank you very much, Caroline Jones, for those remarks. I'll try and cover off all of them. I've had conversations with various colleagues—the Minister for housing in the last instance, for example, my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport, and my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Local Government and Public Services—around some of the issues that you raise. Some of them are within our control, others not so much. We'd very much welcome, for example, the ability to regulate some of the bus services, which would allow us to specify specific spaces for wheelchair users in particular, but actually other issues that Mike Hedges also highlighted around visual and aural aids to assist somebody to be independent. I don't know ifthe Member or any of the other Assembly Members present have been with one of our many disability charities and been put in the same position as a person with sensory deprivation and then walked through a familiar place; then you soon get a very good idea of some of the physical barriers. But there are also, as the Member points out, a large number of attitudinal and organisational barriers. So, the plan will also be addressing misconceptions around what people can and can't do and also some unintended consequences.

And if I could finish, Dirprwy Lywydd, with this example that was given to me by one of the young people that I was talking to at the conference that I attended with Leonard Cheshire and Delsion, a Disability Confident employer conference. A local employer had been extremely encouraging and had said a lot of the right things about wanting to employ people with disabilities and particular impairments and so on, but at the same time had increased the flexibility requirements of all of their entry-grade jobs, so that in order to be employed there, you now had to be able to do all of the tasks across every entry grade. And that meant that people with specifically good ability in one area, but who perhaps couldn't do everything, would not be able to access that, and the employer had to have that pointed out to them before they realised that that would have that effect. It wasn't intended, and in fact they hadn't even seen that it was happening. Once pointed out, however, they embraced the idea and were very happy to look again to see whether that, what seemed to them, standard employment practice was actually having an unintended consequence. And that's the kind of conversation we are looking to have across Wales to make sure that, when people look at their HR strategies and their specific job descriptions and so on, they actually think about it from the point of view of somebody who might have a disability, if they've just put something in that job description that would effectively bar a person who would do that job extremely well and be a real benefit to their company.

So, I think that anecdote from that young person and the actually quite happy outcome where the employer recognised the issue demonstrate perfectly why the framework is needed and why we need to disseminate it as widely as possible. I'd be very grateful, Deputy Presiding Officer, if Assembly Members could use all of their networks to make sure that we get as many responses as possible to our consultation. Diolch.