Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD) [V]]

[Baroness Andrews (Lab) [V]]

Equality Act 2010 (Amendment) (Disabled Access) Bill [HL]

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, once again, I am very happy to support this Bill. It makes me smile that the noble Lord is introducing a Private Member’s Bill when his job at one time was to shout “Object” to every such Bill in the other place. Well, I shout “Support” now.

It is also very welcome that so many more non-disabled Peers are here to support the Bill. Perhaps, one way or another, this means that the time is now right for us to make some real progress. As has been said by nearly every speaker, what is simply not recognised in general is that there is no person or body actually and actively in charge of policing access to public buildings, such as shops. I wonder if shopkeepers believe they have to do something only when they are told by someone in authority that they have to do it—and if they are not told, they do not. Funnily enough, a lot of people have heard of the DDA, but because it is never talked about, as it has been subsumed into the Equality Act, they do not think it matters any more.

Since the summer, I have had the pleasure of living in a hotel room on Westminster Bridge Road in the Waterloo area. I have since rather fallen in love with this part of London, with its wonderfully old-fashioned feel and its surprisingly vibrant community. One of the streets is called Lower Marsh, which has much in common with Strutton Ground—which the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, mentioned last time—in the way of a street market and little shops, although it is not quite as well heeled. But, sadly, most of the shops are up a little step or two and so are quite out of reach for those of us on wheels. The exceptions, of course, are Boots, Greggs and the Co-op, which therefore do well.

As far as I can see, nothing has changed for the better since the last debate on this Bill. The Government may have appointed shopping champions—I wonder whether they have—but unless they actually make a difference, there is not much point. Nor do I think that chambers of commerce are much help in this. Why not? We need a concerted campaign in this area. Shopkeepers need all the help they can get with everyone buying everything online. Why are local authorities not helping them by trying to come up with solutions? I wonder whether there is explicit guidance anywhere about how a reasonable adjustment could be made to solve the problem of small steps up to small shops in a street with narrow pavements. We heard in our committee deliberations that no more explicit guidance was needed on reasonable adjustments, but we all thought that that advice was wrong.

The Bill is about permanent ramps, but I have been doing a little research into portable ramps, which are better than nothing and could be put down to allow a wheeled vehicle in and out and then be taken away. After all, in some settings a permanent ramp is just not possible. Obviously a permanent ramp would be the best solution, but it might intrude too far on to the pavement. Local councillors should be lobbied to get their council officials to help with this. I am informed that there is much they can suggest, and I will give another plug to that estimable organisation, the Access Association, which can also help. But as a temporary measure, I say we should get chambers of commerce or mayor’s offices to put some money into buying a stock of portable ramps, if shopkeepers will not take action themselves. They could run an experiment for six months or so to see what the take-up was. A notice could be put on the shop window or door saying a ramp was available, with a bell to push.

As for listed buildings, Westminster Abbey has a couple of portable ramps it puts down for vehicle users, which work very well. Our church, St Margaret’s, has a built-in ramp—even better. From the Minister, we do not want aspirations, we want action. So I hope she will come up with a concrete plan—I choose my words deliberately.

Disabled Children: Online and Verbal Abuse

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for her Question. She is absolutely right to raise it. To mete out hate crime against children must be among the worst types of hate crime of all, because they are defenceless. She will have noticed the Home Secretary’s announcement last week that, having provided more than £450,000 to the Metropolitan Police towards the development of an online hate crime unit, we are now developing a national hate crime hub online. We are also working with industry to tackle hate crime. The police are well aware and working with the CPS on understanding why the number of referrals and prosecutions is perhaps not as high as we might have expected. The volume of reporting tells us that people are becoming less reticent to come forward to report what is frightening crime against their children.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, disability is apparently not listed on Twitter as a specific category, unlike race or religion. Despite reassurances given to Trailblazers earlier this year, it is still not listed. Will the Minister take this up with Twitter as a matter of urgency, as some of the tweets one sees are quite shocking?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I agree with the noble Baroness: not only are they quite shocking, some of them are pretty disgusting. I was unaware that disability was not listed on Twitter, although it certainly is a strand of hate crime. I can tell her that the Home Secretary has been in deep discussion with some of our CSPs, including Google, Twitter and Facebook, and I will certainly raise that back at the department, because I was unaware of it.

Committee on the Equality Act 2010 and Disability Report

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, I have been about this House in one capacity or another for nearly 40 years, and it struck me at the beginning of last year that the progress disabled people have made and the noise they have had to make in order for things to change had all but ceased. I pay tribute to all the many disabled Peers who manned the barricades during that time from this position in the Chamber, which led to this area being called the mobile Bench—almost certainly the smallest but most formidable group in the House during the 1980s and 1990s.

Cut to 2010, when the Equality Act hoovered up all people with protected characteristics into a single Act, repealing the landmark Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which my noble colleague Lady Campbell of Surbiton had such a lot to do with. Was this why the voices of disabled people had stopped being heard and progress seemed to have ground to a halt? Or was it simply assumed that the rights of disabled people were done and dusted? Whatever the reason, it was a worry, so I was very pleased that the Liaison Committee agreed to set up this committee to look afresh at the disability provisions in the Equality Act under the banner of post-legislative scrutiny. We could not have been better served by our chairman and staff, and I feel immensely proud of our report. It is so clearly written that it is a really good read, and we all hope it will inform the debate on the rights of disabled people for many years to come, especially if its recommendations are acted upon.

All through the report, the voices of disabled people who gave us their views come through loud and clear. I just wish that these same voices could be heard more of the time across all government departments. We do not just talk about dry-sounding, although important, matters such as the public sector equality duty but about the lived experiences day to day of disabled people and what happens to them when no one appears to be checking to see whether the Act is being adhered to.

There was one subject dear to my heart which we could not tackle, and that is the benefits system as it affects disabled people, because that flows from various welfare reform Acts, not the EA, and so was outside the scope of our inquiry. But there was a crossover in our recommendation 35 for a cumulative impact assessment—which has already been referred to this afternoon—to be undertaken on fiscal measures introduced by the Government which may disadvantage disabled people. This is something many organisations have been calling for, as there is now an increasing number of disabled people living in poverty. As we have heard, there is a difference of opinion between the Government and the EHRC on this. I urge the Government to listen to the EHRC and carry out the impact assessment as a matter of urgency.

There was a real problem with including disability in one Act with the other protected characteristics, because disabled people do not just want equal treatment; they want reasonable adjustments made so that they can live their lives to the best of their ability—which does, yes, in many cases mean receiving special rather than equal treatment. But the report does not call for the Equality Act to be unpicked, and nor did most of our witnesses. We certainly suggest changes to both primary and secondary legislation—we have heard about many of them already this afternoon—but many of our recommendations do not require legislation and are cost neutral.

Before leaving the question of disability being swept into the EA, it has been illuminating to note, as our chairman did, that inequalities are now top of the new Prime Minister’s agenda, but she has not so far talked about disability as a subject to be addressed under that headline. I hope that that changes soon.

While on the subject of the Prime Minister’s agenda, it is worth looking at where disability sits in government. Our Minister is now Penny Mordaunt MP, whom I welcome to her role, and who I am pleased to say is a Minister of State, unlike her predecessor. She is the sixth Minister for Disabled People in six years—there is no long service medal in this role—and we hope that she will really champion the rights of disabled people across government. It has been very dispiriting for those of us who try to establish a good relationship with a Minister over several months to find that we have had to start all over again with yet another Minister after such a short time.

We are now in a time of flux when there is a great deal of change in how the Government are organised. The Government Equalities Office sits at present in the Department for Education under the Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities, but the Office for Disability Issues, which was set up to provide coherence across Whitehall on disability matters, sits in the DWP, along with the benefits system, thus not helping with the perception that all disabled people are to be characterised as benefit claimants at best and scroungers at worst. It is important for this part of the DWP to stop emphasising what it cannot do, take a grip and start being much more proactive, particularly if the Government are serious about trying to halve the disability unemployment rate, which needs a huge step change of activity from both the Government and the EHRC if it is ever to happen. We were expecting a Green Paper about that later this year, but goodness knows where that has got to.

Thousands of disabled people are very keen to contribute to this country’s economy and become active participants rather than just recipients of benefits, but they need help to make employers aware of what they need, or do not need, in the workplace by improved guidance and examples from the EHRC of reasonable adjustments and transport, including taxis, that is accessible and reliable, with disability training made mandatory.

Before leaving the whole subject of where disability sits across Whitehall, I wonder whether the very fact that it spans almost all departments of state without anyone having an overview is the reason why the government response to our report is so inadequate. It is deeply complacent, and I endorse the call of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for it to be withdrawn and rewritten. How can “initiating conversations” achieve more than “the blunt instrument of regulation”? When did a conversation ever equate to enforcement?

I was at one such conversation or round table held with people from the hospitality industry and the former Minister for Disabled People earlier this year. It was a perfectly amicable event, but I have still put my name to an amendment through the Policing and Crime Bill to the Licensing Act 2003 to make failure to comply with the Equality Act a ground for refusing a licence. In other words, local authorities would have power to revoke any licence of a restaurant, pub, club et cetera, in extreme circumstances when reasonable adjustments were not made to existing premises—something that local authorities cannot do at present.

Let us get rid of this ridiculous characterisation of regulation as a bad thing in itself, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, said. This comes from the Red Tape Challenge, which is about ridding the business world of burdensome regulations. Often getting rid of such so-called burdens on business puts a greater burden on disabled people, as the report makes clear. Why was no one in government pointing that out? For example, the power of tribunals to make wider recommendations was repealed, and the EHRC’s conciliation powers were abolished. Why did no one in government speak up? Presumably, it was because it was not the job of any one of them.

The question of “reasonable adjustment”—an anticipatory requirement for services, although not for employment—was at the top of the page when we identified five items from the report. Should those two words be defined more clearly in statute, because they sound quite vague? A disabled employee, or a carer of a disabled person, might need their working hours adjusted to become more flexible. What about a ground-floor business premises which has no room for an accessible toilet? A local authority access officer, or one from the Access Association, might be able to advise on making an existing facility suitable for everyone to use. The little-known Access to Work scheme run by the DWP for disabled employees might help to pay the cost. An access officer might also be able to find a practical solution to making a listed building accessible. It is a myth that listed buildings are untouchable.

In the report, we recommended keeping the flexibility of the words “reasonable adjustment”, but urged the EHRC to issue more guidance and examples, which is what our evidence called for. So our message to the Government is, “Please implement our recommendations without delay. There is no excuse for not doing so”.

Shared Spaces

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)]

My Lords, I must confess at the outset that I myself have not had a great deal of experience of shared space, but when I have encountered one on foot I have liked the general ambience, the absence of kerbs and the lack of nose-to-tail traffic. However, I can see that there is nothing to commend them to blind and vision-impaired people, or to many severely mobility-impaired people, unless there is no traffic at all. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, has rightly highlighted this problem as one that must be addressed urgently, and I congratulate him on securing this debate.

First, we must all ensure that we are talking about the same thing. I am grateful to Living Streets for providing me with a glossary of terms in its brief, explaining that shared space, shared surface and shared use are all a bit different. The noble Lord’s Question is about shared spaces—in other words:

“a street or public space where vehicle movement and other activities are combined through informal social protocols, negotiation and design solutions rather than through formal regulations and controls”.

I have read the guidance, which I think is in Local Transport Note 1/11, and was concerned to read the rather complacent sentence under “Visual impairment”. It said:

“If the context and objectives of a shared space scheme proposal indicates that a kerb-free design is desirable, mitigating measures may be required”.

Is that really good enough?

The conventional view is of course that a shared space is a welcoming and friendly environment that enhances everyone’s experience in using it, whether for shopping, sightseeing, meeting people or whatever, where pedestrians, cyclists and drivers all have to watch out for each other as no one group has priority over using the space. However, if just one important group of people—namely, blind and vision-impaired people—have an overwhelmingly negative experience, the shared space is not working and should be altered, not least because the local authority is failing in its public sector equality duty under the Equality Act 2010, which the noble Lord, Lord Low, has just mentioned. It is very important to mention that duty because it is being used less and less now as we move away from the Equality Act 2010.

All shared spaces are different, and it is the responsibility of the local authority to make it possible for society as a whole to use a shared space. One study done in Hereford, to which I will refer later, said that participants liked the principle of shared spaces more than the practice. As I said at the outset, as someone with mobility problems, I like the absence of kerbs because steep kerbs are impossible for me to navigate, and there are many roads where you have to go for a long distance to find a dropped kerb; they are not as prevalent as they should be in this country. For someone with a visual impairment, though, the lack of kerbs makes it equally impossible for them to get their bearings. Some of the reasoning by planners, such as the eye-contact rule, also highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Low, shows this up. When I asked Keith Hatter, the chair of Winchester Area Access for All, for his views as someone with a visual impairment, he said:

“The idea that ‘eye contact’ should be a means of interaction between motorists and pedestrians is an irresponsible one, not only for visually impaired people but also for those, such as wheelchair users, whose eye level may be different from that of most pedestrians”.

Mr Hatter is forthright about priorities, stating that he believes the ethos of a shared space must be that pedestrians have priority and that motorists should give way. He is surely right to say there should be a clearly marked route without traffic around the perimeter of any shared space so that vulnerable pedestrians and wheelchair users know they will be safe there. For this to be a reliable space, it must be kept free from restaurant tables and chairs, A-boards and so on. To some people this might seem to negate the whole idea of a shared space. However, this is the minimum requirement of a reasonable adjustment which society must make to stop anyone feeling excluded because of a disability.

The question of kerbs is a difficult one. Mr Hatter makes the point that the use of little kerbs is problematic because they are a real trip hazard. He advocates the installation of kerbs of at least 80 millimetres in depth with strategically placed dropped kerbs, because he says that a guide dog would then recognise it as a point at which to stop to await further instructions.

A few years ago an interesting study was done in Hereford, which I mentioned earlier, about a shared space in Widemarsh Street, which is open to traffic only at certain times of day. There is a blind college in Hereford, which I believe had insisted on the installation of little kerbs. However, the kerbs caused a lot of people to trip, and those who did the study concluded that a tactile edge was a much better compromise than a kerb. This brings me back to my main point, which is that for shared spaces to work successfully, they have to be thought through very carefully, with full consultation with as many users as possible, particularly with vulnerable users. Contrastingly coloured paving must surely be used, as well as tactile marking.

Bus routes should not be considered for proper shared spaces. In my limited experience, bus drivers will always think they take priority, whatever the original concept of all users being equal might be. Going back to the guidance, I was alarmed to read on page 46 the following sentence:

“There is anecdotal evidence of buses and taxis sometimes travelling at inappropriate speed in certain shared space streets. It might therefore be worthwhile contacting bus operators and local taxi companies to ensure their drivers are aware of what is required of them when passing through these areas”.

Again, I ask whether that vague suggestion is anywhere near good enough.

The Hammond and Musselwhite Hereford study ended thus:

“It can be concluded perhaps that context … is crucially important and that different areas require different urban form or infrastructure changes”.

Shared space, it said, is not a singular concept but,

“a term that encapsulates many different designs bespoke for the relevant context”.

I agree with the conclusion that each shared space plan must be bespoke, with everybody’s needs rigorously taken into account; and, most importantly, that there must be post-scheme monitoring. I add my voice to those of others who have asked the Minister what action the Government will now take.

Disabled People

Baroness Thomas of Winchester Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Low, for the opportunity to raise a couple of specific matters. One is very familiar to old DWP hands in this Chamber who have heard me raise it many times before: namely, the problems posed by the service user involvement of disabled people in receipt of benefits. The other matter is completely different and arises from the new descriptors of the work capability assessment, which were the subject of a debate a few weeks ago and to which the noble Lord, Lord Rix, referred.

I shall begin with this last issue. One of the matters that struck me when we debated the recent changes to the WCA was that manual wheelchair users may no longer automatically be entitled to ESA—presumably neither the employment and work-related activity side of ESA nor the support side. This change was made, I suppose, on the grounds of equality, as it was felt that if manual wheelchair users had no other particular health problems they should be treated as fit for work because they had adapted to their disability. On the face of it, that looks fair enough because we are told that the ethos of the work capability assessment is to identify claimants on the basis of their functional capability rather than their condition. We know that the WCA looks at only a person's fitness for work; it does not take into account the jobs market or, more controversially, whether a person is likely to find a job in the real world. This came out strongly in the Social Security Advisory Committee’s report.

It might be argued that most workplaces nowadays are fully adapted for wheelchair users, but that is very far from the case. Many workplaces are up steps with no alternative access and many do not have facilities such as disabled lavatories. It is true that most public buildings have adaptations nowadays, but we are talking about workplaces of every shape and size all over the country. With the emphasis now on the shedding of jobs in the public sector and the hoped-for growth of jobs in the private sector, is it really fair to put manual wheelchair users on a par with those with no mobility problems when there are not going to be so many public sector jobs? They are likely to find it many times harder to get a job than their able-bodied counterparts—and I have not mentioned the problem of discrimination at all.

The most worrying thing is that, by being entitled only to JSA rather than ESA, they will lose almost £30 a week. I know that there might be cases in which access to work will help, but this admirable scheme cannot change the access into a building, widen doorways or put in disabled loos. I have not mentioned transport, which must loom large in whether someone in a manual wheelchair can get to suitable employment. It may be said that DLA is designed to help, but it is not taken into account by the work capability assessment. If it is taken into account, so should the availability of accessible and suitable jobs. Of course those in manual wheelchairs wish to be treated as ordinary working people, but when the dice are loaded so heavily against them in a practical way, is this fair?

Before my noble friend quotes from the equality impact assessment in the relevant statutory instrument, I shall do so myself. In theory, it gives me some comfort, but I fear that I am very sceptical. It says:

“For those who have a more limited availability for work and scope to find and carry out certain types of work they can restrict their work search activity and availability for work provided those restrictions are reasonable given their condition. This is agreed between the customer and personal adviser”.

There is a sentence about the disability employment adviser later. Will Jobcentre Plus staff really have enough time to devote to those who have such practical barriers to the relatively few jobs open to them, and will they be subject to the tough sanctions regime? I should have thought that they needed the kind of help to get a job that they would receive under the ESA regime, and I would welcome the Minister’s comments.

I now turn to the second and quite separate issue of service user involvement, specifically the unresolved problem of those disabled people on benefits who help with NHS, public health and social care research. They are asked to take part in clinical trials and other health and social care research studies, not just as subjects but as active partners in the research process. Disabled people are asked to help improve the way in which research is prioritised, commissioned, undertaken, communicated and used.

The specific unresolved problem that I would dearly love to nail is that the reimbursement of out of pocket expenses, and sometimes a small fee for these people, is still taken off their benefits. Two years ago, legislation was introduced in this House by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, which to great rejoicing removed two significant barriers to involvement by allowing these expenses to be disregarded when benefit entitlement calculations were made. However, this change was relevant only to those whose involvement was in the field of health and social care services and not research. In other words, this new and welcome change in the legislation applied only where the involvement was required by law. The benefit changes apply to involvement with local authorities, landlord authorities, NHS trusts and health boards. They do not apply to involvement with the work of the National Institute for Health Research.

Are we talking about relatively few people who are being caught by this distinction? No, we are talking about thousands of people, as a glance at the website of the institute will show. Research is going on into every organ in the human body and into every condition. Not everyone involved in this kind of research will be on benefits, but many will be. The institute recommends as good practice the involvement of service users and carers in research, but it is not required by law, so the benefit changes do not apply to public involvement in research.

When universal credit is introduced under the Welfare Reform Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, I understand that the regulations introduced two years ago will be incorporated into UC regulations, but the changes to benefit rules on the earnings disregard will not resolve the benefit barriers to involvement in NHS research. This is because any reimbursed expenses, plus possibly a small fee and the cost of a personal assistant or a replacement carer, will be totalled and the whole amount treated as earnings and taken off benefits. Where the total amount that is treated as earnings is in excess of the earnings disregard set for UC, which will usually be in the region of £40 a week or less, the excess will lead to a 65 per cent taper of UC for every £1 over.

Then we have the outrageous matter of notional earnings, which means that if a person declines to take a small fee because they do not want to upset their benefit arrangements, they will be treated as though they had taken the fee, so they are most likely to be out of pocket as a result of helping with NHS research and are not likely to repeat the experience. I myself have helped with people taking the MRCP exam, so I know what it is like. I was not on benefits, but if I had been I would have been out of pocket. I hope the Minister will agree that this is an anomaly that we really must resolve as soon as possible. The new Bill gives us the perfect opportunity to do so.