Is the government condemning its own life chances report to failure?

The government will never achieve its target of achieving equality for disabled people by 2025, says Andy Rickell.

I have some bad news. The government has targeted 2025 as the date for achieving substantive equality for disabled people, but I can already predict with certainty that it will not happen.

Why? Because parts of government and the state sector are already making decisions that will affect our lives in 2025, and they are the wrong ones.

Some examples: the government has been building new children’s centres to support all children’s development. Excellent! So why does the programme fail to ensure they fully include disabled children, who need such support most?

Building Schools for the Future is a massive capital programme to build new schools – schools that will be around in 2025 and beyond.

Some new mainstream schools are being commissioned which are not fully accessible, and there are also plans for mega-size special schools, which will both warehouse and segregate children from their peers, and go fundamentally against the public’s wishes for more personalised solutions to meet educational needs.

For disabled people, the programme might better be called Building Segregation for the Future.

And it gets worse. There is a need for over 300,000 more accessible homes, and the government is committed to new housing for the population generally. An excellent opportunity, you may think, to address this key barrier to independent living. Infuriatingly, not an opportunity that will be grasped.

And it goes on. Perhaps one of the silliest examples is the building of a new rail infrastructure that fails basic access requirements – new footbridges that only have steps, for example.

In theory, the government should be led by its commitment to the Improving the life chances of disabled people report. So why do parts of government act as if they are headless chickens without a map, sabotaging disabled people’s future aspirations in the here and now?

One question worth asking is that, with over 17 years to go to 2025, would a different government change tack to ensure the 2025 target was still achievable?

On current evidence, the answer is no because disability equality is still peripheral to the main parties’ political priorities.

Labour is committed to equality in theory. However, the vested interests of some unions will result in slowing change in such areas as social care, inclusive education, welfare benefit reform and sheltered employment. To achieve independent living requires a radical shake-up of the way government “does disability”, and I am not confident that a Labour government would tackle it with sufficient urgency.

On the opposition benches, the Conservatives have been strongly supportive of the special schools lobby, and this would slow the necessary reform of mainstream education, which will be crucial if disabled (and some non-disabled) children are to have the skills to compete successfully in a modern labour market. And the Lib Dems, while having a disability policy fundamentally developed around the principle of independent living, have not got the public support in Westminster elections to put pressure on the other two parties.

Waiting for 2025 and hoping is a pointless exercise. The “oil tanker” of government needs to turn harder now.

• Andy Rickell is an executive director at Scope.