London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Tom Brake Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Again, I bow to her superior knowledge from her time on the Select Committee. She has heard more evidence about this matter than I have. I am merely reading the report and giving a flavour of the recommendations.

When I worked for Asda, for a number of years I had the privilege and pleasure of being responsible for the facilities and services that we provided to our customers with disabilities. After car parking and the abuse of disabled car parking bays, the biggest issue that was raised by our customers with disabilities was the accessibility of the toilets. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green that we ignore at our peril the difficulties that people with different disabilities experience in accessing toilets. There is no one category of disability whereby we can have one kind of turnstile and people think, “Well, that’s fine, everybody can get through that.” We should appreciate that lots of people have different types of disability that make different types of equipment difficult for them. Instead of having turnstiles that will no doubt catch out people with one or another type of disability, we should be making toilets as accessible as possible for everybody so that their disability is not affected.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Because the disability discrimination laws would apply, the problems of access that the hon. Gentleman is highlighting should not apply to turnstiles. Furthermore, the fact that these turnstiles allow for the mechanical collection of charges should mean that there will be more, not fewer, public toilets.

[Philip Davies]

We absolutely do not know that, and neither does the right hon. Gentleman. I will come to that later.