Equality 2025

Equality 2025 - Report from RDN



On Monday 3rd November 2008 a public meeting of Equality 2025 took place at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. I went along on behalf of the Regional Disability Network West Midlands.
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Equality 2025 was launched by the Minister for Disabled People in December 2006 as the United Kingdom Advisory Network for Disability Equality. The network is made up of 23 disabled people and has been set up to feed the views of disabled people across the UK into government to improve policymaking and service design.
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The first ever national public meeting was held at the same venue (ICC, Birmingham) in November 2007 and regional meetings have been held at other venues throughout the past 12 months.
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The issues on which Equality 2025 have advised the government include the Single Equalities Bill and the Human Embryology and Fertilization Bill. The Equality 2025 members attend events around the UK listening to the views and interests of disabled people. The aim is to feed these views back to the Office for Disability Issues and also to develop a stronger media and internet presence.
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The underlying Government vision of Equality 2025 is:
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“by 2005, disabled people in Britain have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life and will be respected and included as equal members of society”.
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The over arching aim of the group is to ensure that policymakers across government understand disabled peoples’ perspectives on a variety of issues and are able to tap into their views and experiences.
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Meeting 3rd November
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The meeting on 3rd November was very well organised in terms of meeting the communication needs of disabled people and was well attended. The venue was fully accessible and in a central location. There was however an undercurrent of criticism around the lack of marketing for the event locally, with many organisations finding out about the event at the last minute through word of mouth, including the RDN ourselves. Even organisations on the contact list who attended the very first meeting twelve months ago told Equality 2025 that they had not received updates throughout the year or information about today’s event.
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Clearly this is something which needs to be addressed by Equality 2025 in the future. In terms of the Regional Disability Network, we are now on the contact list so hopefully we can inform our own members about consultations, developments, papers and events in the future. I also made contact with Clenton Farquharson who is the regional Equality 2025 representative for the West Midlands region. We feel it is important for the RDN to play a more active role within the Equality 2025 network – providing our own network with a route through which to make the views of member networks and groups known to government. We may also be able to support Equality 2025 to reach a wider range of disability organisations and disabled individuals across the region.
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There were concerns expressed from the floor of the meeting that Equality 2025, being a government created network, can not campaign and therefore there was some scepticism about it’s long term effectiveness. Again, this is where the role of the Regional Disability Network and similar networks around the UK could be vital in terms of bringing a stronger collective voice to this body.
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Presentations and Workshops
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There were presentations on a number of key issues followed by round-table workshops where delegates discussed the presentations and came up with views and recommendations. The topics included:
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1) Overview of Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People
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2) Independent Living, Individual Budgets and Employment
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3) Education and Skills for Life and Work
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4) Getting the support we need: The future of the Care and Support system
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5) Getting out and about – Being able to go where we want
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With around 200 disabled people present at the meeting, there was obviously a wide and comprehensive range of views. The workshops I attended were on 'Education' and 'The future of the Care and Support System'. There was a lot of very well informed discussion and consensus on things like inclusive education and social care to be government funded and assessed by user led CILs. We will circulate the full report from the conference and put it on the RDN website when we receive it from Equality 2025.
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Again, in the workshops there was an underlying feeling of frustration that many of the issues had been discussed in the past and that key principles that had been developed by the disabled people’s movement were still being discussed by government, in many instances a decade or more after some of these principles were first expressed. There was therefore the suggestion that this has the potential to be a talking shop where disabled people’s views are invited through Equality 2025 but government change is either not forthcoming or is changed to suit political and economic agendas.
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As much as I feel this frustration is legitimate and justified, I also came away feeling that there is an opportunity of dialogue with government through this network and felt that the 23 Equality 2025 members themselves were committed, credible individuals who are at least articulating the views of disabled people to civil servants and ministers and that the methodology of regional and national meetings is more likely to attain a representational set of ideas on any one subject than the traditional ways that government has consulted in the past, i.e. consulting only with hand-picked 'champions' and chief executives of national charities, etc.
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It would be useful to see Equality 2025 working more closely with user led organisations and networks in the future, such as the RDN, as we are ideally positioned to feed a wider range of local and regional views into the national Equality 2025 process. The very open structure and methodology of Equality 2025 in it’s present form, could be seen as both a strength and a weakness. The network is not hindered by the bureaucracy of being a constituted organisation, it can be very inclusive in terms of the people attending the events and it has no pressures of funding and survival because it receives direct government funding.
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However, the weaknesses are that it has no mandate to make demands of government, which presents the possibility of having views ignored or watered down even when there is a powerful consensus from event delegates. This only needs to happen a few times or on some contentious debate and the credibility of the whole process begins to crumble. Another challenge is how to support the very useful anecdotal evidence gathered at such events with more objectively measured research evidence, to make sure that the views of disabled people are not easily dismissed or compromised, as is the way of governments.
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For instance, a personal view from a disabled person might be "the government should pay for me to live successfully in the community because I will have a better quality of life". But the case can be made stronger for the government when we show them evidence that it costs the state less to support independent living than it does to keep people in institutional residence. In other words, there remains a strong case for funding disabled people's organisations who can carry out this research in a more structured way - subjective opinions can be disregarded more easily than objective data gathering.
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Watch this space.
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For more information, visit the 2025 website at:
http://www.officefordisability.gov.uk/equality2025