Consultation consultation consultation

While it’s right and necessary for the Government to consult all parties to monitor if it’s getting things right, when it comes to Blue Badges, things have gone too far

Oh no! Not another Blue Badge consultation!

When an email about another Blue Badge consultation arrived in my inbox in March, I thought I had a bad case of déjà vu.

After all, it was only in March 2007 that the last consultation on Blue Badges was carried out, and prior to this there had been a review in November 1999.

I originally thought I’d been re-sent the 2007 consultation, entitled “Blue Badge Reform Strategy”.

On closer inspection I realised the Government was consulting again. This time the consultation document was called “Blue Badge Reform Programme”.

After comparing this with the 2007 consultation, it seems to me that the new one is more interested in the finer detail of how changes should be made and how enforcement would work.

Now I completely under­stand the reason behind consulting but when you think that the first review was in 1999, it seems pretty amazing to me that we are still being consulted on changes over ten years later.

Although there have been some changes over that time, such as a change from an orange to blue badge and the introduction in September 2006 of the power for police and parking enforcement officers to inspect Blue Badges, there have been very few changes to the way people are assessed and how people found mis-using badges are treated.

In my opinion these two issues, along with the delays, are the biggest problem with the scheme.

My concerns are shared by Joe Hennessy, Chair of the Joint Committee on Mobility for Disabled People, who speaks here in a private capacity.

“It seems like governments have been either reviewing or consulting about the Orange/Blue Badge scheme for the last 27 years, most of the time like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.

“Both Conservative and Labour administrations have lacked the guts to sort out the mess that they and the local authorities have created. The present ‘reform’ programme, which is a pale imitation of what it should be, still, unbelievably, has another three-and-a-half years (make that at least five in reality) before it is implemented. It needs to be taken from the politicians and bureaucrats and given instead to the disability organisations to rescue.”

What concerns me most is that the review in 1999 came about after pressure from a number of disability organisations, including the Disabled Persons’ Transport Advisory Committee (DPTAC), because of concerns at the increase in the number of badges on issue and the perceived abuse of the scheme: the same problems the scheme is experiencing today!

After the review, DPTAC made 47 recommendations only a few of which were implemented by the Government. Maybe if more of them had been implemented at the time, the scheme wouldn’t be in quite such a mess as it’s in today.

The Government’s reason for not implementing more of the recommendations was apparently that it needed “additional research and further cross-governmental consideration ”.

So now we are into yet another phase of consultation and I for one hope against hope that this will be the last one for a very long time.

Hopefully, very soon, we will see some major improvements in the way the scheme is administered and enforced, and as a result disabled people will be able to do what the scheme intended – park!

• The consultation exercise for implementing the Blue Badge Reform Programme will run for 14 weeks, closing on 2 July 2010. If you would like to respond to the consultation, visit: dft.gov.uk/consultations/open/2010-20