More must be done to help disabled people in Britain

This is the Daily Briefing from the Reaction team, delivered at 7pm Monday to Friday. Explaining the stories that really matter, and recommending reading.

Finding our way back to something close to living a normal life is proving difficult for many of us. But for the one in five people in Britain who are disabled, the return to normality must be a nightmare. A recent poll by Scope suggests that only 2 per cent of all disabled people feel safe post “Freedom Day” and that one in seven will continue shielding.
 
The news follows the government’s latest initiative to improve life for disabled people in Britain. The National Disability Strategy is being billed as the “most far-reaching endeavour in this area for a generation”.
 
Introducing the £1.6 billion scheme, Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, said it would “help level up opportunity and improve the everyday experience of disabled people” – whether that be at home, online or exercising civic roles like voting.
 
Hope of a better future comes at a difficult time for disabled people. Figures suggest that nearly six out of every 10 people who died with coronavirus in England last year were disabled – and this community continues to suffer from the virus.
  
Even without Covid, the National Disability Strategy makes it clear that the 14.1 million people living with a disability in the UK struggle with the harrowing effects of institutionalised discrimination on a daily basis.
 
Looking at just a few of the shocking statistics from the document: over half of disabled people worry about being insulted or harassed in the street; disabled children aged 10 to 15 are almost twice as likely to be victims of crime than other children; and there are seven million working-age people with a disability or long-term health condition in the UK, but only a little over half are in work.
 
But what disability campaigners say is less clear is how the government’s document of almost 100 new proposals will bring about any meaningful change in these areas.
 
Mark Hodgkinson, CEO of Scope, said that although short-term commitments in areas such as workplace disability figure reporting and public transport are welcome, gaping holes remain – most notably in policy for disabled children and improving the disability employment gap. He said the money earmarked for the strategy was “not sufficient, and in many cases not ‘new’ money.” 
 
There was also criticism of the survey used to create the strategy, with the Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations pointing out that it was not co-designed alongside the disability community and that its online-only nature made it exclusionary.
 
This disability strategy was a real chance for the government to introduce concrete policies and long-term funding plans to show that it was serious about turning their “levelling up” and “build back better” slogans into real-world change for those in society who need it most.
 
As Kamran Mallick, CEO of Disability Rights UK, puts it: “Government talks about levelling up, and a week after we saw some of the world’s richest men blast into space, we are waiting to see the Government put a rocket up its disability policy.”