Living, learning, but no new laws

By Katharine Quarmby

Jenny Morris (pictured) is, clearly, quietly pleased with the independent living strategy, launched in early March.

No surprise: she has spent the best part of three years navigating the corridors of power as a consultant to the cross-departmental Office for Disability Issues, to help deliver the strategy for disabled people.
Co-production was at the heart of how it was developed – a departure from the usual tokenistic model of consultation, although Ms Morris smiles and says that everybody is “still learning”.

The regional workshops were problematic for disabled people because, she says, “it was quite difficult for people to recognise that they weren’t [just] being consulted. It was much more ‘here is a blank sheet of paper, what should we be doing?’”

Last summer, when she and others presented their interim report to ministers and a panel of experts, there was a “huge list” of more than 100 policy proposals. This was pruned to 51 in the final report.

Key to the report is an emphasis on older disabled people and a move towards personalised budgets and direct payments, advocacy and brokerage, disabled parents and transition to adulthood.

The National Centre for Independent Living and the expert panel called for new laws, so I ask Ms Morris about the lack of new legislation in the strategy.

She opens up the report and points to the detailed monitoring framework.

She adds that the government is considering setting up an independent living scrutiny group to oversee that process.

I ask if she is worried about the rumblings of concern from directors of social services and some academics about alleged fraud in direct payments – given that the strategy stresses that direct payments, coupled with personalised budgets, are the way forward. “It has been difficult in some organisations to change the culture and promote direct payments,” she says, adding that “there is some thinking that individual budgets will get over that”. So expect an intensification of choice and control – rather than any rolling back of that agenda.

The strategy focuses most strikingly on the rights of older disabled people. Dame Jane Campbell, Rachel Hurst and Jenny Morris herself are just three of the veteran activists who are passionate about this agenda. Ms Morris comments on the “unconscious ageism” permeating society, adding: “There has been a gradual realisation that we need to change our attitudes to older people and to apply the same aspirations of full and equal citizenship to all disabled people, whoever they are.”

I ask, finally, how welfare reform and independent living should work together, citing the case of one of our readers who cannot get the social care she needs to iron a shirt, so can’t enter the labour market.

Ms Morris replies that there needs to be more thought about how to “apply the personalisation principles that will transform social care to employment support and bring the two together…so the resources can enmesh to give you the choice and control so that you can get to work.”