03rd July 2024
bbc.co.uk/accessall
Access All – episode 111
Presented by Emma Tracey
EMMA- Well
now, Tom Skelton from the RNIB is here with his box of tricks. And Tom, I’m
hoping that whatever’s in there is going to help me to vote in secret in future
elections. What’s in the box, Tom?
TOM- Well,
one accessible voting solution that allows blind people to vote independently
and in secret is this: it’s the McGonagle reader. It is one audio tactile
device. And you’ve got the integrated audio player on the left. If you want to
feel to the left that’s the black box on the left. And then on the right there
is a column of sturdy windows or apertures or flaps. These flaps cover the
voting boxes for each candidate.
EMMA- On
the ballot paper?
TOM- On
the ballot paper. If you feel up to the top for the triangular tactile button
that will read an overview of our ballot paper.
VOICE- Election
of councillors to any town city council. There are seven candidates in this
election. Their names are: Adedeji Lisa; Beatrice Natalia; Chowdry…
TOM- If
we were actually in the polling booth now rather than having a big speaker you
would have you headphones to listen to the device.
EMMA- Okay,
please to hear it because that’s good. That could be messy.
TOM- You
vote independently and in secret.
EMMA- I’m
actually pretty sure what I want and who I want to vote for so I lift the flap.
TOM- Yeah,
lift the flap.
EMMA- Pull
it back?
TOM- Pull
it back and then it presses down to the corresponding button.
VOICE- Owolabi
Bola, 4 The Walk, Anytown, XY9 5JJ, The Raspberry Party.
EMMA- The
Raspberry Party.
TOM- So,
then you know – exactly – you know which candidate’s voting box that particular
aperture is covering.
EMMA- Okay. So, I lifted
the flap, there was a little box in its place where that was, and this is where
I can cast my vote.
TOM- Yes.
EMMA- In
secret, on my own. I’ve never been on my own in a polling booth. This is
amazing. On my own, stick my pencil in and then it looks like I’ve voted in
secret. Boom!
MUSIC- Theme
music.
EMMA- Hello,
this is Access All, the BBC’s weekly disability and mental health podcast. I’m
Emma Tracey and this episode is the final one relating to the General Election
and questions you told us were on your minds. You can find the rest of those
episodes plus interviews with six of the seven main UK political parties on BBC
Sounds. And you can find those party interviews in BSL on the iPlayer as well.
Please subscribe to us on BBC Sounds, tell your friends . And do
us, I love to hear from you, accessall@bbc.co.uk.
We
have gathered together a of experts, all returners to Access All, friends
of the podcast, which I’m absolutely delighted about. And they’re going to be answering
some of the questions that have been on your minds. Today we’re talking about
employment, cost of living and Carer’s Allowance. Now, on my today we’ve
got Rensa Gaunt from Inclusion London. Inclusion London s over 70 deaf
and disabled organisations in the capital. Hi Rensa.
RENSA- Hello.
EMMA- It’s
lovely to have you. We’ve also got James Taylor from disability charity Scope.
He’s the executive director of strategy, impact and social change. And we’ve
got the BBC’s social affairs correspondent, Michael Buchanan. You’re very
welcome Michael.
MICHAEL- Thanks
very much.
EMMA- Now,
Michael, let’s start with employment. And it’s a very big one on disabled
people’s minds always, and you’ve been covering it for years. What have
disabled people always said to you about the employment situation for them?
MICHAEL- Well,
in broad many disabled people that I’ve spoken to over the years have
said that they would like a job, but they would like a job essentially that
recognises the limitations of whatever their disability is, but at the same
time gives them an opportunity to go out and to perhaps socialise and to meet
people and to earn their own money. And I think when you look at the party
manifestos employment, certainly for the big two parties, Labour and the
Conservatives, is a big thing because both these parties are viewing a huge
increase in the benefits bill towards the end of the new parliament. So, by
2028/29 the benefits bill for disability benefits is due to be £58 billion.
That’s a projection by the Office of Budget Responsibility. And that is
approximately £20 billion more than it is this year. So, both Labour and the
Conservatives are looking at that big increasing amount of money and thinking
what are we going to do about it.
EMMA- But
what about people who are already in work and who are disabled? Many, many of
you have been in touch with us about Access to Work, which is the government
scheme set up to help disabled people with their extra costs around being in
work. And Chelsea Soden sent us this message:
CHELSEA- I
want to hear more about issues around disability. I’ve been unfit for work
before, but now I work full time with many adjustments from a rare ive
employer. And I’m still waiting to hear about my Access to Work application
made in February.
EMMA- Now,
James Taylor, Chelsea actually happens to be a colleague of yours. Is Chelsea’s
experience familiar to you from what people have been telling Scope about their
employment experiences?
JAMES- Yes,
it is. I think there are many disabled people who are waiting a long time for
adjustments, whether that’s from their employer or from the government scheme
Access to Work. The average wait time is around 44 days; but actually lots of people
that I’ve spoken to have waited far longer than that to get the equipment that
they need. We’ve got 40,000 people at the moment on the Access to Work waiting
list, and not having that equipment or adjustment in place can stop people from
starting a job. It can also mean that many fall out of work as well. So, when I
think political parties are looking at how they’re going to tackle disability
unemployment they also need to be looking at how we’re going to keep people in
work. And Access to Work has to be one of those things that we look at. Some
parties have talked about it. Labour have talked about tackling the backlog; they’ve
talked about improving reporting. The Lib Dems have talked about raising
awareness of Access to Work and speeding up applications. And other parties
haven’t really said anything. But Access to Work if it was better promoted, if
there was more funding put into it and if applications were sped up I think
we’d see far more disabled people staying in their jobs rather than feeling like
they have to leave because they don’t have the , the equipment, the
technology or the adjustments in place.
EMMA- Rensa,
you’re London based, what are the other employment issues for disabled people
that you’ve seen come up and that people have been asking your organisation for
with?
RENSA- So,
something that we have asked for as part of the Disabled People’s Manifesto,
which is a document written by lots of deaf and disabled people’s organisations
across England, is that we want better access to work, as we’ve mentioned, and
also equal pay and mandatory reporting. So, currently large organisations do
have to give information about the gender pay gap in their organisations. We
want to see that across different protected groups like disabled people,
including intersectional figures. So, for example if you’re paying disabled
women or disabled people of colour lower than everyone else that’s something
that we really want to know.
I’m
also really worried about some of the rhetoric that’s coming through in some of
the party manifestos. If we look at the Conservative and Labour and Reform
manifestos they all have scarily similar messaging. So, the Conservative one
says, ‘those who can work to themselves should work’. Labour says ‘people
who can work should work’. And Reform says, ‘we will ensure those who can work
do work’. So, it’s not about opening up more opportunities for disabled people,
that’s not how it reads; it reads like we will force you to get a job. And
that’s something that scares a lot of people.
EMMA- We
asked many of the party representatives around the language around getting
disabled people into work, and we asked them various questions around that.
James Taylor, what would you like to see happen in of disability and
employment? Or is there anything you hoped to see in the manifestos that you
didn’t see and that you’d like to see brought forward?
JAMES- Yeah,
I think there’s a couple of things. One, the sort of scant mention of
disability and employment outside of this huge cost that is projected to come
in that Michael has talked about. I think the issue we’ve got is we do have
lots of people who are out of work because of a disability. That number is
increasing. It seems like the solution across all parties is we’re going to
make it harder for you to claim a benefit. What they haven’t explored or
explained is actually why there are more sick, unwell, disabled people now than
there were ten years ago. And that’s down to actually NHS waiting lists being
bigger than they ever have been, limited access to public services – these are
the sorts of things that are causing people to be more unwell.
So, what
we at Scope want to see is a couple of things: One, really trying to address
the root cause, rather than just making it tougher for people to claim an out
of work benefit. Two, a real commitment to closing the disability employment
gap. Some work we did a few years ago found that if you halve the employment
gap, so if you got just over a million more disabled people into work, you’d
actually bring £15 billion per year into the Treasury from reduced welfare
spend and increased national insurance and tax from those people being in work,
which is a huge benefit. And we want to see employment widened. One in
ten out of work disabled people can currently access government employment
; that’s nowhere near big enough. If we widen that more disabled
people would be able to access skills, would be able to access trialling a job.
These are the sorts of things we want to see.
EMMA- So
much there, James, so many things. Michael are any of the other parties saying
anything like what James is talking about there, so Plaid Cymru, Greens,
Liberal Democrats?
MICHAEL- Not
so much [laughter]. The SNP are saying that their manifesto calls for the
scrapping of punitive welfare reforms for the sick and the disabled, which is
effectively seen as the SNP saying particularly to the Conservatives that if
you were to win power we don’t want you to pursue the policies that you might
pursue if we read your manifesto. Plaid Cymru they would like to see an
increase in the speed with which people with autism and neurodiverse conditions
that they get assessed so they can get the right sort of . And the Green
Party for their part are saying that they would like to see a 5% rise in
disabled benefits immediately.
EMMA- Now,
let’s move on to something else that we’ve had so many messages about, and
that’s the cost of living crisis. It’s something that has seemed to
disproportionately affect disabled people. The Trussell Trust said that seven
out of ten people who are referred to their food banks are actually disabled.
Now, as I say you’ve been ing us about this issue in your droves. Jenny
Hughes said on X:
JENNY- All
the social issues, including benefits and healthcare and housing and travel and
environments and jobs, affect hashtag disabled people most. We are more likely
to live in poverty and substandard housing, be evicted/homeless, be unemployed,
suffer mega health inequalities, and die earlier. Exclusion kills.
EMMA- And
Darren Brooke emailed:
DARREN- We’ve
all been hit by the cost of living crisis, but I have extra costs due to
disability on top of that which, after including PIP, are around £1,000 every
month. As a result we’re stuck in a growing cycle of mounting debt. It’s
absolutely destroying my mental health, and it’s become impossible to remain
positive as there’s no light at the end of the tunnel and no hope from the
political parties.
EMMA- Michael,
you’re the BBC’s social affairs correspondent, you’ve spoken to many, many,
many people, including disabled people, about the cost of living over the last
few years. Have any of the parties directly acknowledged it in the manifestos?
MICHAEL- Well,
it’s a difficult issue for the two main parties in particular, because
effectively what we’re talking about in many cases is how do you tackle poverty,
and in particular, as you were hearing there, the number of people who go to
food banks who have got a disability as well. And there is frankly no clear
detail as to how the number of people going to food banks will be reduced by
either party. The Labour Party have spoken about wanting to end I think they
call it the moral scourge of the food bank use. But in of how you get
from saying that to actually seeing fewer people in food banks it isn’t quite
clear at all. The Liberal Democrats they’ve made a big issue throughout their
entire campaign of their manifesto being around care in particular. Ed Davey,
as you well know, has got a history of caring for his son and caring for his
mother before that, so they are very clear that they would like to introduce
significant policies that would help people that need care. So, they would like
to see things like carers being paid £2 more per hour than the minimum wage to
try and attract more people into the system.
EMMA- Yeah,
and we’re going to talk about Carer’s Allowance later on as well, which is kind
of related to that. But why are the parties not talking about this increase in
food bank use, not talking about the fact that it’s disproportionately
affecting disabled people?
MICHAEL- I
think it’s complicated to solve and it’s expensive to solve. I think that’s
basically the analysis that many of people who have spoken to me about it in
the last few weeks have said. Essentially if you accept the arguments that
Conservatives and Labour have put forward in particular there really is very
little money in the system, then essentially if you’re going to tackle poverty
you’re going to have to spend money. And the political parties at the moment
have made a choice that they would like to spend the money that is available in
other areas. And so if you speak to organisations like the Trussell Trust they
accept that this can’t be fixed overnight. But the Trussell Trust were telling
me a few days ago that they want to see a potential future government coming
forward and setting up concrete steps as to how you get from 3.1 million food
parcels being handed out in the last financial year, how do you reduce that and
how do you reduce the sheer number of food banks that exist in the country at
the moment. It’s something that has become normalised in recent years.
EMMA- James,
you’ve talked to me before about the extra cost of being disabled. What have
Scope been hearing from disabled people about the cost of living, about the
amount of money that they have and the amount they need?
JAMES- I
think the main thing to say is the cost of living crisis hasn’t gone away, and
many disabled people’s living standards are worse now than they were five, six
years ago. We know from work we do that disabled people on average would need
an additional £975 a month to have the same standard of living, and that’s
because many people are diverting money to costs that non-disabled people don’t
have: higher energy bills, having to keep your home warm, having to charge
equipment, having to pay for specialist equipment. But we’ve also heard from
lots of disabled people who are going days without food, days without
showering. These are things, like food bank usage, that are sadly becoming
normalised in society. And the main political parties have got very little to
say about it, as Michael has said, and what they are saying is actually we want
to tighten Personal Independence Payment, the benefit that is designed to
offset some of those costs.
EMMA- Rensa,
London is particularly expensive, isn’t it, as a place to live. What are the
big costs and the big things that disabled people are coming to Inclusion
London asking for with?
RENSA- One
thing that’s a real issue is the cost of social care. So, even if you are on
benefits you are asked to contribute financially to the cost of your social
care. So, it might be deemed that you need a certain amount, the council
allocates you a certain amount of care, but they can take up to 45% of your
benefits away to pay for that care. And, as James has said, some people are
living with huge additional costs: they might be getting extra medication that
doesn’t come on the NHS; they might be having to pay for private treatment,
private physio – anything that is not provided by the NHS and is necessary for
their condition essentially. And those are people who have already got much
higher costs than everyone, and then we’re saying the benefits that you’re
getting, which are already really low, we’re taking that away and you’re having
to choose between getting the care that it’s been shown that you need, or
people are getting into serious debt. And that’s really, really worrying.
EMMA- You
know what, when you work in London sometimes you get something on your wages
called London weighting, because London is a particular expensive place to live
so you get some extra money because you live there. What are the biggest
expenses specific for Londoners? And is there a London weighting on benefits,
Rensa?
RENSA- Things
like PIP no, even though obviously things do cost differently in London. It’s I
think one-third of deaf and disabled people live in poverty, and two-thirds of
people in poverty either are disabled or live with somebody who’s disabled. And
that’s only even more keenly felt in the capital. We have a big shortage of
accessible housing for example, which means that people are living in
conditions that are really poor, but you cannot afford to get something that
meets your needs. And so you’re really having to think okay, do I move out of
area and lose my network, what am I going to have to compromise on. And
that’s really keenly felt by a lot of disabled people in London.
EMMA- James,
what’s your sense of London and being disabled in London? Should there be a
difference in benefits depending on where you are?
JAMES- Well,
I hadn’t really thought about it, but I think we could be. I mean, we do it
with wages so I don’t see why you couldn’t. I would argue that benefits rates
are way out of line and whack with people’s actual lived experience of costs.
And I think there’s a whole case to be made about reforming PIP and the
assessment and what costs it’s capturing, and maybe location could be part of
that. But for me, if you can’t get on the Tube because not every Tube station
is accessible, I live in Walthamstow, it has a lift but it’s out of action
probably four days out of five; you then might be forced to take a taxi, so
that’s a cost. And those sorts of things can add up. And when it’s rush hour
and you need to get to work that’s going to be more expensive. It’s great that
there are disabled people’s railcards and travelcards, but they are off-peak.
If you work, you know [laughs] you’ve got no chance.
EMMA- Yeah.
There is the Freedom in London.
JAMES- There’s
the Freedom .
EMMA- But
I know Rensa I’m sure you might be about to jump in and say a lot of the
infrastructure and the transport network isn’t accessible, so even with the Freedom
you end up having to take a taxi or do parking. What do you think, Rensa?
RENSA- Transport
costs in the capital are wild. If you think that there are so many parts of the
network that are step free. But for example the mobility aid that I use will
fall down the side of a lot of the trains. So, even though it is ostensibly
step free there are certain routes that I can’t safely use.
EMMA- So,
is that like a walking mobility aid?
RENSA- No,
it’s a power chair, but it’s a really lightweight one, and that means that the
power behind it it can’t get across some of the gaps.
EMMA- I’m
going to move on now to the Carer’s Allowance. Now, before the election was
announced there was a lot in the news about Carer’s Allowance. Unpaid carers
get an allowance if they care for over 35 hours a week. If they work a certain
number of hours their allowance reduces or is stopped. Many people started
working and they didn’t know that their allowance was supposed to reduce. DWP
didn’t fill them in on it; they were overpaid Carer’s Allowance, and then some
people ended up being taken to court to have to pay back massive amounts of
money. The SNP’s Marion Fellows equated it to the Post Office scandal when I
was talking to her. Now, listen to this message from Michael Hunt:
MICHAEL- As
the carer of a loved one I contribute hugely to the economy and the social
needs of this country. Home carers have been deliberately isolated by
successive governments so they can remain unrecognised for their unrivalled
contribution. Home carers can’t change jobs, get promotion, go home after their
shift. They can’t retire until they or those they love die. Invisible. Perhaps
if 10,000 carers took their loved ones into Parliament Square and left them
there we might get the help that we need.
EMMA- Gosh,
that’s a really strong message there from Michael. And we actually have had
messages from disabled people themselves about the Carer’s Allowance as well.
James Taylor from Scope, have any of the parties referred to Carer’s Allowance
in their manifestos or how they would reform it?
JAMES- From
my reading there’s just one, and that’s Liberal Democrats who’ve said they
would increase Carer’s Allowance by £20 a week from the £81 it is now to £101.
The other parties have talked about social care and I think probably social
care has been a bit more prominent in this election than previous ones. But
only the Liberal Democrats have talked specifically about Carer’s Allowance.
None have talked about the arcane rules that you’ve just been highlighting.
EMMA- Michael,
broadly speaking, what are the differences between the parties on this issue?
MICHAEL- Well,
if I call it a conspiracy of silence on the particular overpayments and how to
deal with them. I mean, I think Labour, to be fair to them, would like a review
into what has happened and understand, get to the bottom of the problem. But I
think a review is as far as they would go at the moment. The Conservatives
broadly believe that the system is working and that the people who have been
prosecuted by and large broke the rules and therefore were apt to be
prosecuted. I think the Liberal Democrats they have made a big issue of care
within their entire manifesto. As I say, they would like to pay carers £2 an
hour above the minimum wage as well. And they say that this whole thing would
cost about £3.7 billion annually, which they say they could fund by a variety
of plans that they have laid out.
The
other thing to bear in mind with broader social care is next year there’s meant
to be the cap on personal care costs. That’s due to come in, it’s due to be
£86,000. Now, one of the problems has been that to get to that system requires
money to be invested in local authorities, and that money has already been
spent. And so it would require a new financial commitment by whoever the
government is in order to make that cap limit a reality.
EMMA- Rensa,
you listened to that message, we’ve had messages from disabled people as well
about Carer’s Allowance, what would Inclusion London like to see happen there?
RENSA- I
think the Lib Dems and the Greens have said that increasing Carer’s Allowance
is really important, and the Lib Dems have also said that expanding eligibility
is important. Because at the moment you can get £81 a week, but only if you
earn less than £151 doing any other work. And it’s only for one person as well;
so many disabled people do need more than one person looking after them. The
Lib Dems and the Greens have said that they would increase benefits and also
end the five-week wait for Universal Credit. And the overlap between disabled
people receiving care and people claiming Universal Credit is quite high. So,
those are things that could potentially mitigate the low Carer’s Allowance. But
really we just want to see it brought up to a level where people can have a
decent standard of living. The Conservatives have said in their manifesto that
they hugely value the work that unpaid carers do ing their loved ones,
and as a way to show that they’d give employees who are also unpaid carers an
entitlement to a period of unpaid leave, so basically to say thank you, you can
have unpaid time off work to do more caring. To me that’s not a good reflection
of the value. I think we should be making it so that people can also have a
decent standard of living and not just saying, you won’t get fired for taking
time off work to do the thing you need to do.
EMMA- So,
you’ve all been through the manifestos in one way or another. What about Plaid
Cymru and disabled people? We had Liz Saville Roberts on. What did they say
that came to your attention?
MICHAEL- The
key thing that they would like to do is to increase the speed with which people
with conditions like neurodiversity, autism, ADHD, the speed with which they
get assessments and therefore get access to the right level of . They’ve
also, being the party of Wales as they style themselves, they also want to see
more funding sent into Wales. One other point we should point out is we haven’t
really spoken about Reform UK at all in the discussion, and I think part of the
reason for that is that they haven’t really said very much in their manifesto
on disability issues at all or on the benefits system. They have said the
benefit system is broken; well, okay, but they haven’t laid out what that means
or how they might reform it. Bearing in mind as well they want to pay the first
£20,000 of anybody’s earned income, they want that to be tax free, so that
might lead to more people being able to keep more of their money. But there is
very little detail from Reform UK – so a manifesto is a contract, isn’t it – on
what they would do with the benefits system and disabled people in particular.
EMMA- Well,
thanks everyone for your amazing insights into all of our big questions today.
I do just have one more question. Now, Rensa you are in Manchester and you’re
about to take part in a disability hustings, what will you be doing on election
night?
RENSA- Well,
as many disabled people do, I vote by post, so I already voted quite a long
time ago. I will just be watching on election night and the day after to see
what happens.
EMMA- Rensa
will be watching. James, what will you be doing on election night?
JAMES- [Laughs]
on election night, well I’ll try and stay up for as long as possible. But as a
father of two tiny children I think trying to get some sleep is a good idea.
EMMA- It
doesn’t get going till 3am, you might be up then anyway.
JAMES- I’ll
be up then anyway yeah [laughs]. I think really waiting to see what whoever’s
in power will say about disability. There are 60 million disabled people in the
UK, one of the biggest minorities.
EMMA- And
we’ll be interested to see how many disabled MPs there are after election night
as well. Michael, where will you be on election night?
MICHAEL- My
oldest daughter turned 18 about two months ago and she likes her politics, so
she’s really, really excited to go and vote for the first time on election day.
And then she wants us to sit up and watch it as long as we possibly can, so I
suspect that’s what we will be doing.
EMMA- So,
you won’t be out there in the middle of it?
MICHAEL- I’ve
done a few of them in the past and it’s hit or miss as to whether the count
that you end up actually matters. I one where two of the main
candidates ended up in a punch-up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and the
returning officer had to abandon the whole count and it was started again at 10
o’clock the following morning. That was a good one.
EMMA- Well,
it’s all going to be very civilised here on Access All, I can tell you that
much.
Thank
you so much to my of experts: Rensa Gaunt from Inclusion London, James
Taylor from Scope, and Michael Buchanan, the BBC’s social affairs
correspondent. Now, you can hear all our election episodes plus our
interviews with six out of the seven main UK political parties on BBC Sounds.
And you can see the party interviews in BSL on iPlayer as well. You can get in
touch with us accessall@bbc.co.uk.
Please subscribe to us on BBC Sounds, and tell your friends . There’s
so much election related stuff for them to listen to between now and Thursday.
Have a very merry General Election. Bye.
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