Equality and Human Rights Commission: Disability Commissioner

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, for the opportunity to say something about the EHRC’s approach to the disability agenda, even though his own experience with it is not a good one. The question before us, which is a valid and really rather difficult one, is whether the disability agenda is best served by those who have oversight of all the protected characteristics that concern the EHRC or whether it should be particularly promoted by one disabled commissioner with a dedicated committee. If the latter, should all the protected characteristics be treated in the same way?

As for disability, the practice in the recent past was a statutory disability committee chaired by a disabled commissioner, but there is now just an advisory committee with all the commissioners having a duty to oversee the disability agenda. If one were to ask a body of disabled people which model they would choose, I am pretty sure they would go for the former. The reason is simple: as we have heard, so much of life, public and private, is denied to disabled people even now and there are still so many battles to be fought, be that video relay services so that deaf people can take part in everyday life or wheelchair users wanting to travel independently on public transport without feeling that they are entering a lottery. They would want the strongest voice possible to get things changed. After all, there are so many different disabilities, all with their own particular problems.

The question of whether disabilities should ever have been bundled up with the other eight protected characteristics is at the heart of what the House of Lords equality and disability committee tackled in its March 2016 report. I am very pleased to say that our chairman will speak more about that. The committee made the point that the other protected characteristics need equality of treatment to bring about equality of opportunity but different treatment is required for disabled people. Although several of our committee’s witnesses wanted to go back to the old days of a separate commission, which we just heard about from the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, our committee concluded that it was better to make improvements to the working of the Equality Act than to take disability out of it. The commission is quite open about its reasons for disbanding the Disability Committee, saying that it was often on a different page from the commission as a whole. It said that there should in future be a “managing of expectations”, which will inform its relationship with the new Disability Advisory Committee. I am afraid that I find that phrase rather chilling. Does that mean, “Be realistic, don’t ask for the moon” or, “We are not going to promote this issue at this time because we are concentrating on another non-disability matter altogether”?

The House of Lords equality and disability committee called for the statutory Disability Committee to be re-established as a “decision-making body” with ring-fenced resources to increase its visibility and influence, although the report acknowledged that this would have to be in the context of the EHRC as a whole. Contrary to the view, the 2013 independent review of the Disability Committee found that it was not as effective as it might have been and not “hard-wired” into the commission. I am not quite sure what that means in this context. Perhaps someone will enlighten me.

I am not persuaded that disability can be treated on the same footing as the other protected characteristics, particularly in view of the longer lives that both disabled and ordinary people are living now, meaning that ordinary people need services that disabled people need now. We need somebody shouting the odds from the rooftops on our behalf. Perhaps this is for a disability tsar, not the commission. Disabled people want a body that will not rest until it has brought about real change—not a body that has all the right words but not enough action.