Disabled People

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, first, I declare an interest in this debate, as the father of a son with learning disabilities and a trustee of a charity helping deaf children to learn in mainstream schools. I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, for securing this debate and for her tireless work in this area. The prize named in her honour, sponsored by Bespoke Hotels, has done much to encourage designers and architects to take into account those with disabilities when they travel. I also pay tribute to the wonderful maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London.

Disabled people face an enormous number of challenges, but each of those challenges is there only because a disabled person is trying to achieve something. If a disabled person faces the challenge of driving a car, they do so only because they want to drive a car. That is different from the barriers faced, say, 20 years ago. Then, they would have been told that driving was not something for them. So, as barriers to ambition have fallen, challenges have appeared. That must be celebrated. The more that disabled people achieve, the more that challenges become apparent. Changing the mindset to deal with obstacles and challenges is important.

Lee Ridley, better known as the Lost Voice Guy, recently won “Britain’s Got Talent”, the ITV prime-time reality show. He has cerebral palsy—but of course, that did not matter: he had the audience laughing in the aisles and the viewers at home dialling in to vote for him in their millions. What the Lost Voice Guy proved is that overcoming the challenge is the most important thing. His disability actually played to his advantage; it defined his act, allowing his comedy to shine through. There are many people who regard themselves as defined by their disability and believe that their barrier is the most important thing in their lives. I think we have to see the glass as half full.

The technology of cochlear implants, for example, has improved drastically in the last 20 years, and, as with most new technology as it develops, the price has come down drastically. Improvements in technology are something that we should be encouraging and celebrating, especially in the fields of language and communication. There are many people who are physically disabled, but I might say that I am impaired in the very many different languages that I cannot speak—such as Gujarati, to choose one at random. But there are now apps that translate entire paragraphs of foreign languages just by hovering the camera over the page.

Traditionalists may balk at this—surely a cultured person will take the time to learn a language. However, these apps and technologies increase, not reduce, communication. The crucial thing is that technology takes away my fear. The fear of a mistake is inhibitive and intimidating. By simply using technology, I am no longer afraid to make a mistake in talking to locals. New technology will deal with my problem in Gujarat, which is my inability to communicate in Gujarati. Similarly, technology must help people with physical disabilities.

I have so far spoken about positivity and technology. The tech entrepreneurs are the sum of those two parts. They are some of the most positive people in overcoming the challenges faced by disabled people. Seemingly, more brainpower than ever is expended on helping disabled people live better lives. In times gone by, the approach was almost functional—a person could not walk, so build them a wheelchair. That is a good thing in and of itself, but today’s problem solvers dream bigger. These days, it is actually cool to solve these problems. Technology is changing the lives of disabled people forever and for the better.

There are more reasons to be cheerful. I have a friend who was born with no arms and no legs, but he has a driving licence. He might have a claim to be the most disabled person with a driving licence, but is it not wonderful that he has one? While he is competent in controlling his vehicle, there must be many others with a worse condition who cannot drive. My friend has freedom. He is able to live on the spur of the moment. He is less dependent on others and less dependent on the state. His independence and freedom mean that he has milk in his coffee if he has run out and needs to go to the shops—everything that people without a disability take for granted.

When automated vehicles are on the road, almost all will be able to share the joy my friend has in his freedom. We should be positive about seeing the benefits of that type of technology. We are often too negative and let the problems of the past make us gloomy about the future. The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, has a prize in her name which asks people to be innovative and positive, and to overcome challenges. We should adopt that mindset as we seek to make the lives of disabled people a whole lot better.

British and Irish Sign Language

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Thursday 3rd May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest in the register as a trustee for about 20 years of the Ewing Foundation for deaf children, a registered charity. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that communication of every form is vital to deaf people of every age but that the majority of people who have hearing loss are elderly and do not use sign language? Does she agree that the great work of the NHS in fitting cochlear implants to deaf babies and children, together with the expensive training that is required to make full use of them, and the development of new high-tech digital hearing aids enable a large number of people to use their residual hearing effectively? Does she agree that the new technology of cameras fitted to smartphones and Skype calls enables the creation of what is in effect a worldwide video relay service, not only for the users of British Sign Language but for all deaf people and at far lower cost?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend. I entirely agree with him that in supporting access to communication for everyone, the exciting work of the NHS in fitting cochlear implants to babies and children is one example of why, as the Minister of State for Disabled People has said, it is clear that there is now a wealth of technological solutions with the power to make a real difference to someone’s ability to progress in education and also to find and keep a job. This means that we can use more of our devices. It offers more opportunities and a wider range of ways in which people can break down the barriers of hearing impairment. Of course, the majority of people with a hearing impairment are elderly and for the most part they do not use sign language.

Grenfell Tower: Tenants

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

I thank very much the noble Baroness for her question and her welcome. I absolutely understand where she is coming from. First, I make it absolutely clear that all emergency and temporary accommodation is rent free for everyone affected. The noble Baroness will know that it is very difficult for us to compel local authorities to ensure that there is no shortfall but, that said, we are doing everything in our power to ensure that that simply does not happen.

As for the benefit cap and the removal of the spare room subsidy, it is for the Department for Communities and Local Government to manage the accommodation, but we can say that those placed in temporary accommodation are not subject to the removal of the spare room subsidy. We have already relaxed the benefit rules for anyone affected by the Grenfell Tower fire, and our staff are handling people’s claims with sensitivity. All I can say is that we are doing everything that we can in our power to ensure that people will not have to suffer a shortfall if they are moved on a permanent basis into a larger property.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, declaring my interests, I know that the Government have announced an indemnity for those tenants illegally subletting their social housing in this tragic block. How many such indemnities will be issued, and is subletting a general problem in council-run social housing?

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I do not have the exact answer on indemnities. All that I can say is that we are doing everything that we can to ensure that nobody suffers in any way from a financial standpoint as a result of this terrible tragedy. Indeed, as a department we are making sure that we have expert staff on site in the local community assistance centre and seconded into the victim support unit located there. We are working closely in providing every victim with a key worker to ensure that payments can be made immediately. Indeed, a number of payments have been made already—249 cash payments of £500 and 112 payments of £5,000—and 841 people have also received discretionary payments from the fund, which is a government grant.

Brexit: Disabled People

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I leap briefly into the gap. I declare an interest as trustee of several charities, notably the Ewing Foundation for deaf children. Brexit changes Britain, but we do not know exactly how. The negotiations have barely started; all we have are our worries and our hopes. While we in this House will in future be considering a positive mountain of regulations, we know that we will have the benefit of many Members with personal knowledge of disability. I doubt there is a legislative chamber in the world with such effective and numerous representation of disabled people. The further point, however, is to make certain that the voice and opinions of disabled people are heard and thought about when regulations are formulated, not just at this legislative stage.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I first must congratulate my noble friend Lord Lupton for an outstanding maiden speech, in which he has carelessly set the bar very high indeed for his future performances. I have known the noble Lord for some years, and I know that he is widely respected in the City of London and by his colleagues. To have that combination of wisdom and friendliness is an awesome mixture, which will encourage no end of requests for him to volunteer to help in this House. I predict that we will hear from him those words often muttered in this House, “I wonder why I volunteered for that”.

My noble friend Lord Lupton is clever enough to actually understand the welfare system, while not actually needing it. I recently saw a video on YouTube making the point that it would take the world’s fastest speed-reader more than five days straight to read through the entire UK tax code. The regulations and guidance on the myriad benefits that are available to claim may pose an equally difficult challenge, so much so that I am sure that the ability to really understand the benefits system is a skill that would make anybody employable at a very high level.

I noticed that the benefits cap puts a cap on a total of 14 different benefits. We have a structure so convoluted that I am not sure that anybody who administers it can really control it. Universal credit will do much to simplify the system but there are still dozens more benefits, which keeps things complex.

Perhaps much of the complexity came from a previous Chancellor, Gordon Brown, a man who is reputed to believe that anybody can understand this composite cat’s cradle. I am not sure how many claimants get all 14 benefits, but the sooner we get a simpler system in place, the better.

So, the benefit cap—at £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere—has to be a step forward. I wonder, though, whether future claimants will regard it as a new measure of success to get the maximum rather than anything less. I am sure that we can rely on the benefits system to retain enough complexity to keep people employed.

I wanted to talk about Clause 20, an important clause which manages to take up 38 lines without using the one word which describes the subject of that clause—Motability. Clause 20 takes up those 38 lines, and only manages to improve the Government’s deficit by charging Motability a sum of about £1 million. Every million pounds counts, we are told.

The Motability scheme has been a great success over very many years. Founded by my noble friend Lord Sterling, it has enabled millions of disabled people to get a car—which would otherwise have been impossible. Indeed, it has provided finance to a group who may be described as being about the only big group in our society unable to obtain finance. This is partly because of the well-known fact that poverty is inextricably linked with disability. The regular stream of income from welfare payments is irrevocably diverted to the Motability scheme for the length of the finance term. Because of this, Motability has been able to obtain catering quantities of finance to lend to disabled borrowers. It has then been able to use its buying power, as the largest individual purchaser of cars, to obtain discounts unavailable to other people. Of course, there is a further enormous difference in the VAT position. VAT is not charged on vehicles purchased by Motability, but a second-hand car is generally sold without VAT.

I may have a certain advantage over other noble Lords in that I had the privilege of running a portion of the Motability scheme. That involved financing wheelchairs and scooters, in partnership with a great charity called the Enham Trust, for a period of seven or so years until we sold it back to Motability Finance. So I have no interest to declare, but I do have a certain amount of out-of-date knowledge and a lot of respect for the people who run the Motability scheme. When I took over the powered wheelchair finance scheme, I little realised that I was entering a trade that made the fictional Arthur Daley look like an angel. The scams, rip-offs and downright fraud, with disabled people as the victims, were amazing. We sorted out the book and got rid of most of the bad dealers, promoting the good ones and serving the customers much better.

One thing always puzzled me about the car scheme—the way that the scheme provided the same sort of car, including insurance, everywhere in the UK. That was because the level of benefit was identical throughout the UK, despite car insurance varying widely in price depending on where you lived. Essentially, then, disabled customers in countryside areas, or perhaps with small mileages, were subsidising disabled customers who lived in London or Northern Ireland—places with historically higher insurance rates.

Given the immense problems which disabled people generally face, perhaps one group of disabled people having an unfair advantage over another is not the worst problem that can perplex noble Lords who are trying to do the right thing. Maybe we should try to do something about why disabled people are generally poor, or why poor people have a greater chance of becoming disabled. There are difficulties with both, but I feel that the problems of cross-subsidies could perhaps be ameliorated by the structure hinted at in this Bill—that of introducing more competition into the Motability scheme. If there were a choice of finance providers, such bias in the system would soon disappear. There is a king-sized danger of vulnerable customers being mistreated, as there is in any finance scheme, but competition and good regulation have a way of driving out the bad guys.

The great success of the Motability structure over the last 40-odd years of its existence is that it has really changed the market. It has moved disabled drivers from those horrible three-wheeler Invacare trikes, known to most people as Noddy cars—and usually mistaken for Reliant Robins—into a system where, if you were looking for the group with the highest percentage of new cars, it would probably be younger, mobility-impaired, disabled people. That they have more new cars, financed at cheap rates, is a triumph. So this partnership between a charity and a finance company is a powerful structure.

Why do we limit it to things with wheels? Could it not be widened to embrace parts of the health service and benefit distribution as well? Noble Lords on all sides of this House would encourage the Government to do more of what they do well. Noble Lords on this side would like to stop the Government doing things they do badly. Surely the Motability system is one of the best organisations that we have, so we should look at ways to widen the range of things it might do. I wholeheartedly welcome Clause 20 of this Bill, but I ask the Minister whether it could not go further forward on this point.

BBC: EU Coverage

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, it strikes me that everyone thinks the BBC is biased against their own personal viewpoint. Those on the left think it outrageous that business representatives are on the news more frequently than trade union leaders. They have also said that, although there is a general bias to political incumbents, Conservative politicians get far more airtime than anyone from Brown’s Government ever did. Conservatives think that the more obvious partiality of the 1970s and 1980s—admitted by Mark Thompson to be a “massive bias”—is still in existence today. We think that the BBC has pushed issues such as the bedroom tax without any grounding in fact. Indeed, Conservatives would argue that the BBC using the phrase “bedroom tax” is itself indicative of bias, given that it is not a tax at all. Perhaps this highlights part of the BBC’s problem: it has become too big, while still trying to maintain some semblance of balance.

How do we get an insight into the BBC’s world view? It may be reflected in the stories that its planners consider running on radio and television. Where do they get those stories? Last year it was shown that the BBC continues to purchase more copies of the Guardian—68,307 copies—than any other paper. It bought 58,000 Telegraphs and 60,000 copies of the Times. The Guardian has far lower circulation figures than either of those papers, not to mention the tabloids.

Having said that, I actually think that producers and presenters work quite hard to achieve balance in the BBC’s political output. It is very far from perfect, of course, but you cannot say that staff at the BBC do not try. However, the BBC plays an important role in deciding what is part of a reasonable debate on a given issue. If staff decide that a certain expert or group is not suitable to come on its vast number of political programmes to discuss something, that person or group is instantly seen to be outside the terms of reasonable debate—a pariah, an extremist, hard right or hard left. However, I am afraid that Europe is one issue on which the BBC tends to lose any sense of reason. Peter Oborne, in his publication, Guilty Men, for the Centre for Policy Studies, offers more examples than I can offer in this short contribution.

Many of these problems would be addressed if the BBC were to be reformed. The licence fee model is outdated, with the biggest change coming in the past five years or so. It is that watching television is not the only way to watch television programmes. Programmes are watched on phones, tablets, laptops, and they will be watched on devices that have not yet been invented. The BBC has its own iPlayer service, which, like its commercial equivalents, allows viewers to watch programmes wherever and whenever they like. Perhaps the best way to overhaul the BBC is to make it a subscription-based service.

A paper from the Adam Smith Institute outlined some sensible proposals. The BBC could, over a limited period, allow licence payers either to lapse or switch to voluntary subscription. The BBC would maintain a core public service function, funded by a much smaller government grant. “Public service” would be redefined to essentials. The core content would be free and include news, but entertainment and most documentary and factual output would not be free. That would make the BBC a 21st-century organisation, fully adapted to the digital revolution. Subscription models in the US show that people value choice. People will watch BBC material once they have chosen to pay for it themselves. These kinds of reforms would fix a far bigger problem than perceived bias: the monopoly features of the BBC, or at least its dominant market share. It currently has around 70% of the news audience, according to Ofcom.

I once had the privilege of running a monopoly, or at least a company with no competition, in the London taxi industry. I can tell you the truth of the saying, “Monopolies are like babies; nobody likes them till they have one of their own”. The BBC loves its monopoly and thinks that it deserves it. However, I can tell it that in fact competition, though scary to a monopoly, is good for it. You can never quite demonstrate the merits of a dominant business because the customers have no choice. Give them a choice, and wonderful things happen. The BBC can then be proud of its output and of its happy customers, rather than be proud of its monopoly while trying to ignore the thousands of customers criminalised in the magistrates’ court for not paying their licence fee.

There was a programme on BBC2 in March called “The Restaurant Man”, in which people gave up their day jobs to start restaurants. It was nothing at all to do with politics. In that programme, the presenter said, “Opening a restaurant just to make money is wrong”. That, to me, is where the BBC is at its most biased. I am not even sure presenters and producers know it, nor do they think they are doing anything wrong, but the cultural, metropolitan elitism is far more rife than any hard, political bias.

When it comes to the EU, it is clear that the balance of the coverage does not reflect the balance of the paying public’s opinion. Restricting a core grant for public service material will ensure a narrower focus and a much greater ability to ensure balanced output. It will save taxpayers money too.