Disabled People

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to participate in this debate. In doing so, I declare my interest as set out in the register. I thank the noble Baroness for securing this debate and her excellent introduction. Her work and her commitment to this area need no introduction. I am also very much looking forward to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. Her career is impressive. From Westminster Hospital to the Palace of Westminster, via Tommy’s, Chel West and the marvellous Marsden, it is pretty clear that Bishop Sarah, if I may, has positively impacted people’s lives every day. I look forward to sitting behind her in your Lordships’ House in the years to come and to her wisdom drifting up to this Back-Bencher.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, said, there are many areas that one could cover in this debate: public transport, public realm, aviation, the built environment and so on. I shall limit my comments to just two areas: Channel 4 and public appointments.

At Channel 4, we took the power of the Paralympics to attempt not just to change attitudes towards, and opportunities for, disabled people but to change Channel 4 as an entity. In 2016, I was privileged to chair the channel’s Year of Disability, not least because I got to chair a group of people called the Year of Disability advisers, which made me chair of YODA. We looked in front of the camera and behind it and demonstrated that, sometimes, difference can be driven in a short space of time. We took the power of the channel and used personal testimony. Within seven months, we not only changed levels of self-declaration for disability in Channel 4 but increased it fourfold.

We saw the first audio-described advert. We attracted brands from across the world to put together an innovative advertising campaign involving disabled people and put £1 million into it. Have we cracked it at Channel 4? Not a bit of it. Are we on a journey? We certainly are.

I was honoured to be asked earlier this month by the Cabinet Office Minister to lead a review into disabled people’s participation in public appointments. Public appointments play such an important role in influencing and transforming our society, and not just in the organisations where they are made. However, when it comes to public appointments, how many people know about the full range of opportunities that are out there? Current open opportunities range wide from the Darwin commission and Commonwealth scholarships to data ethics, sea fish and no few in Work and Pensions, Justice and Business. There are many opportunities, but who knows about them? Who applies for them? Who is interviewed? Who is appointed? Who is enabled to thrive in those roles? That is the purpose of the review I am undertaking: to create an inclusive environment where disabled people can flourish through that public appointments process.

I will be going across the country to organisations, groups and individuals to hear their views. What are the barriers? What are the blockers? What needs to be done? I say to anybody out there: be in touch with me; contact me on Twitter @LordCHolmes; tell me your experiences of the public appointments process. How was it for you: good, bad or indifferent? Tell me what your experience was. If public appointments are not reflective of our society, how can we be assured that the best decisions are being made in many elements of our public life?

That is Channel 4 and public appointments, but there is a darker side to this debate, which is that there is still more than a deal of discrimination out there. Just by dint of having a guide dog, I can find myself excluded from restaurants, bars and minicabs. A number of years ago, I went to a restaurant and the guy blocked my entrance; I could not even cross the threshold. He said, “We don’t serve guide dogs”. I said, “That’s okay, I don’t eat them”. That is amusing, but not so amusing is the reality of such discrimination. When you experience discrimination, it is not a cerebral experience. You feel it in your heart and in your guts.

I have no doubt whatever as to my noble friend the Minister’s commitment to disabled people, so I want to ask her to outline the Government’s aspiration for disabled people in educational attainment, employment opportunities and public participation. What are some of the key success measures?

Ultimately, it is even more than just considering the blockers, the barriers and the issues that face disabled people. We are talking about enablement, empowerment and addressing that most desperate of drains on our society: the fact that talent is everywhere but, currently, opportunity is not.