New chair equivocal on equality mission

As she takes up her new role as Chair of Equality 2025, Dr Rachel Perkins  tells Sunil Peck that she’s less than hopeful about achieving the ultimate goal

Disabled people are “unlikely” to enjoy full equality by the year 2025, according to the new Chair of the Government’s advisory body of disabled people, Equality 2025.

Speaking to Disability Now soon after her appointment as Chair of the body originally set up in 2006 to give disabled people a voice in government circles, Dr Rachel Perkins said: “2025 for equal citizenship does seem a tall order doesn’t it.”

A clinical psychologist and a user of mental health services, Dr Perkins was voted Champion of the Year by the mental health charity Mind in 2010 (pictured). She worked in mental health services for 30 years and is involved in areas including the development of personal health budgets, the external scrutiny group of the review of Work Capability Assessment, mental, intellectual and cognitive descriptors, the Equality and Human Rights Commission disability-related harassment advisory group and the Stakeholder Coalition on Disability and Employment.

“Since the 1990s I’ve looked at and written about the lives of people with mental health conditions within a social model framework. An important turning point for me was going to America in the 1990s and meeting activists in the mental health user/survivor community like Judi Chamberlin and Andy Imparato who were working as part of a broader disability movement. It struck me as being incredibly powerful and I began to see the parallels between user/survivor ideals about recovery and mental health and the independent living movement.”

Dr Perkins’s three year term as Chair of Equality 2025 began on 1 April. She says that even though full equality might not be a reality until years after 2025, the body does have a significant role to play in ensuring disability equality remains on the political agenda.

“The advice we give is confidential so we are consulted early on in policy development, so there maybe ways that we can nudge and influence. Our previous chair, Rowen Jade, [who died last year] had developed an extremely good reputation for Equality 2025 across government, and I hope to be able to build on the influence she managed to exert.”

In 2010, the Labour Government cut the number of members in the body from a maximum of 25 to eight and turned it from a body which consulted disabled people and fed their views back to ministers into an advisory body.

Like her highly regarded predecessor Rowen Jade, Dr Perkins is passionate about achieving greater equality. But her undoubted drive is unlikely to be enough to convince people outside Equality 2025, who are unaware of who its members meet and what they say, that the body does wield genuine political clout.

She does stress that the body is a confidential advisory group and not a campaigning organisation.

“That doesn’t mean that members don’t have contacts across the disability movement, but our job is not to provide leadership for the disability movement. We have user-led and disabled people’s organisations which are representative of disabled people.”

Asked whether she thought the Government’s spending cuts and welfare reforms represented an attack on disabled people, Dr Perkins said: “I don’t know how much that is a deliberate plot against disabled people, I’m not sure that’s the case. But the consequences of some of the measures taken in a recession could have devastating effects on the lives of some disabled people. But that makes it all the more important to make sure that disability issues are kept centre stage.”

Equality 2025’s work plan for the coming year is yet to be published and Dr Perkins was unable to go into detail about the issues it would be focussing on.