When will the government start taking the needs of disabled people seriously?

The National Disability Strategy looks like a cynical PR game from a government that knows its treatment of disabled people is one of its Achilles heels

Disabled people deserve better from the government (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Britain’s promised “National Disability Strategy” has been languishing in the long grass of Whitehall like a cheap football kicked into it and swiftly forgotten about by a bunch of kids.

But wait, what’s this? Things are moving. Wheels are turning – and at a speed suggesting someone’s found a can of oil for the government machine. Is that an accessible nirvana I see in the distance? Or is it just a sign bearing the legend “same old s***”?

Would you care to take a guess?

This may have passed you by – because it nearly passed me by even though I write about this stuff – but up on the Cabinet Office’s section of the government’s sprawling, but not very good, website sits something called the UK Disability Survey.

This, we are told, is part of ministers’ commitment to “delivering an ambitious National Strategy for Disabled People”. The latter is what the ants in that long grass have been crawling over for months on end.

Going through it, I had a few misgivings. It’s supposed to be anonymous but the questions they want you to answer leave you fairly identifiable. I nonetheless slogged through the 100+ questions before writing this column. If someone gives you the opportunity to speak your truth, you should take it if you can.

But that’s where the problem starts – because even those who manage to overcome the lack of publicity surrounding this exercise may struggle.

Disabled people have unique challenges and I don't see these all being recognised recognised with the way the survey has been put up. You can start with the fact that it’s only available online, which is a fine medium for some of us but can be quite difficult to use for others depending on their disabilities.

A lot of disabled people aren't online at all. It’s become accessibility issue 101, something that ought to have been recognised and might have been if there were more disabled people in government and in public life more generally.

Yes, there is an option for carers to fill in the survey on behalf of someone – but not everyone has such a person available.

Trouble is, however good Justin Tomlinson’s intentions may be we don’t even have, in him, a disabled minister for disabled people.

Given those difficulties, you would expect the government to allow at least the 12 weeks that’s standard for most consultations for people to fill in the survey, if not more.

Yes, the survey runs until 23 April, yet there’s just a month if you want to influence the strategy itself, a bit longer to have input into its “implementation”.

The response of a large group of disabled people’s organisations led by Disability Rights UK has been understandably furious. In a letter to Tomlinson, they described the government’s approach to engagement as “disjointed and somewhat chaotic” and called for a delay to allow for the problems they identified to be addressed.

That would be wise if the government was genuinely serious about a strategy to improve the difficult lives that disabled people in Britain lead. But maybe it isn’t interested in that.

There’s a photo atop the government’s announcement of the survey featuring a young disabled person smiling joyfully with two similarly cheery carers.

It’s the sort of picture that has me grinding my teeth. Seriously, I see it so often I’m losing my enamel.

We see this sort of image again, and again, and again from people who seek to use disabled people as PR props before putting us back in our box, while at the same time waving away reports about the cruelty of the assessments we are required to undergo to secure support and the many other problems we face.

The government has the Regional Stakeholder Network, whose members it declined to pay, that are supposed to input into policy. I’ve received disturbing reports about people being asked to come up “positive stories” for this exercise.

That makes the whole thing look less like a strategy and more like a cynical PR game from a government that knows its treatment of disabled people is one of its Achilles heels.

The hurried nature of the survey, the struggle some people will have with accessing it and the poor quality of engagement with disabled people’s organisations all speak to that.

There is that sign: Same old s***.