The trouble with equality 2025

As a member of the body set up to give ministers and government a direct link to disabled activists, Andy Rickell is worried that this channel may be inadvertently cut off

I have been a member of Equality 2025 since it was set up in December 2006. It’s an independent advisory group of disabled people set up to advise Westminster on disability equality issues across the UK.

It gets the chance to be involved in advising ministers and senior civil servants in developing disability policy and advising on the impact of government policies generally on disabled people. As a result its work is confidential, but it gives a previously unavailable opportunity for knowledgeable disabled people to influence the Government’s activities towards promoting disabled people’s rights. This is all good, and Equality 2025 members do feel that we make a valuable difference.

However, Equality 2025 fails to do a job that the person whose idea it was had in mind. I know, because that person was me.

Equality 2025 was developed by an advisory group whose remit was to recommend how to implement a recommendation of the Improving Life Chances report – to set up a National Forum of Organisations of Disabled People.

That recommendation got into the report after I lobbied the report’s writers to include a mechanism by which disabled people had a direct route to talk to ministers and civil servants. As I was CEO of the British Council of Disabled People (BCODP) at the time, my proposal was hardly surprising. Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) had struggled to get regular meetings with senior government people, and only after Rachel Hurst and I lobbied the then minister, Maria Eagle, in 2001 did we secure national DPOs’ first ever series of meetings with the minister.

It is great that subsequent ministers have continued with these meetings. But there is nothing stopping a minister deciding to end them. Equality 2025’s remit is definitely not about representing disabled people or DPOs directly. So there is nothing yet that secures the representation of DPOs to government, the reason I proposed the idea which has since become Equality 2025. We did try something to address this via a “network of networks” under the Independent Living Strategy.

However this still needs to be addressed, and it is not difficult. All it needs is a simple addition to the existing laws to give legal entitlement for DPOs to have regular meetings with the minister. The law could define how and who would be involved. This would also meet the Government’s obligation under Article 4 of the UN Convention to engage with DPOs.

There might be objections that this gives DPOs unfair preferential status. It does not. Any other organisations would continue to be able to make representations to government as they wished. What this would do is encourage disabled people to want to join DPOs. This would improve the quality of the representative voice of DPOs into government at all levels, which is consistent with “Big Society” outcomes about community voice.

But, even after DPOs have a legal basis for speaking to government, it does not let off the rest of government involved in developing and delivering disability policy, including Equality 2025, from actively listening to and acting upon the views of disabled leaders of DPOs, as key stakeholders in promoting disabled people’s rights.