Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary Mark Isherwood AM, has called on the Welsh Government to take action to ensure that Flintshire County Council fully understands what its new framework and plan, 'Action on Disability: The Right to Independent Living' means, so that it does not continue failing disabled and autistic people.
Responding to this week’s Statement by the Leader of the House on the new plan, which replaces the Framework for Action on Independent Living, Mr Isherwood referred to a number of cases in which Flintshire County Council did not adhere to the old plan and called for assurances that the Welsh Government will ensure that the North Wales local authority - and other local authorities – will observe the plan in the future.
Speaking in the Chamber, he said:
“In terms of roll-out, how will you ensure that this is better understood by public sector bodies and commissioners? I'll give an example. Last year, I had a haemophiliac constituent, a young man who was offered a job by Flintshire Council. The job offer was subsequently withdrawn on the advice of the Council's occupational physician, as they termed the person, although the constituent and his family said that this clinician had low or little knowledge of haemophilia, and the constituent and his family had documentation from his own expert clinicians showing he was perfectly able to do the job. However, the Council dug in and initially rejected the relevance of the Framework for Action on Independent Living in this context, despite my referring to it in correspondence with them.
He later added: “How will you help Flintshire better understand what all this means. I'll give you two examples, One: I had a meeting with the Chief Officer of Flintshire Disability Forum Centre for Independent Living and Officers in the Council regarding the inability of wheelchair users to access the coastal path. We were told that they would tell us what size wheelchair we should tell people to have. I suspect, you might recognise, that is a gross breach, not only of the social model (of disability), but also of the Equalities Act and Welsh legislation.
“And finally, in this context, a group of autistic adults and children I've been working with for years have been seeking a round-table meeting with Flintshire at a senior level, multidisciplinary, now for over seven months, over 150 working days, to discuss the social, psychological and health barriers they're encountering. Because of procrastination, delay and cancellation, that meeting's still not occurred. But we took it up with the Chief Executive. He blamed the autistic people, who are suffering heightened anxiety, who are suffering meltdown, who are contacting me telling me of their suicidal thoughts because of the crisis they've been pushed into by a failure of a local authority hosting the Integrated Autism Service, which fails to understand what the communication and social needs of autistic people are, and are, therefore, driving a situation in which their own Officers are having to cope with situations which the Chief Executive then uses as an excuse not to meet the people who have the answers.”
In his response to the Statement, Mr Isherwood also referred to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report 'Poverty in Wales 2018' which revealed that disabled people make up just 5 per cent of the Welsh Government's own workforce, despite comprising 22 per cent of the population.
He also asked the Leader of the House whether she will reconsider the Welsh Government's approach to the scrapping of the Welsh Independent Living Grant, and how she will engage with the Department for Work and Pensions Community Partner Teams, recruited from people who have personal lived experience of disability, and with Remploy Wales's Work and Health Programme from the UK Government, about which he said: “although it's only compulsory for those unemployed for more than two years, has found that over 80 per cent of the people on the programme are disabled people with long-term health conditions who have voluntarily joined that programme because they wish to access work.”
He added: “Equally, how will you support initiatives such as the Wrexham Enterprise Hub, who have scheduled an ‘Autism: Future Employment’ event on 25 January next year?”
He also raised concerns about the number of third sector schemes delivering independent living, early prevention programmes enabling people to have control of their lives, which have lost their funding, “because invariably statutory commissioners have decided they're not the priority they should be……piling millions of avoidable additional costs onto statutory services”.
Speaking outside the Chamber regarding the elusive Flintshire autism round-table meeting he referred to, Mr Isherwood added: “It is deeply concerning that Flintshire’s Chief Executive provided a response which may be applicable to the communication needs of most people, but fails to acknowledge the communication needs of autistic people. All these autistic people asked for from the outset was a constructive roundtable meeting to focus on what they described as ‘the missed windows and additional educational, psychological, social and health damage suffered”.