Don’t tell me people with learning disabilities aren’t productive people

By Rob Hicks

Suffice to say you have to do something pretty amazing (actually in this case, wholly objectionable) to cause such a storm on a normally sleepy Westminster Friday afternoon. The vociferous opposition towards Philip Davies’ disability pay proposals voiced yesterday were wholly justified however.

Davies proposed that people with mental health issues and/or disabilities should not enjoy the protection afforded by the National Minimum Wage, supposedly because their labour is not worth the minimum £5.93 that the labour of people who do not fall into this category is worth.

We come to an immediate moral hurdle when considering this: are we willing, as a country, to have a system that affords rights to some but not others? This is the system that Davies is proposing, a system where you must forego the protection that our labour laws bring if you happen to have mental health issues, were born disabled or have an accident that impairs your physical or mental ability.

The way to address the figure quoted by Davies – that only 16% of people with a learning disability are employed – is not by forcing them to accept employment on different terms to their peers. An acknowledgement that employment does not merely exist to generate wealth and that productivity comes in many forms would be a good place to start.

Dig a little further and we find that Davies has an obsession with measuring humans as instruments with which to create wealth that borders on the perverse. His assertion (which he went on to reassert on Radio 4’s PM programme) that “people with a disability are less productive than those without a disability” is a lazy generalisation at best. The comment made me think about the holidays I spend with young people with learning disabilities in Oxford during summer. I asked myself what we ‘produced’ during these holidays.

Turns out we produce a lot. For a start we produce laughter and fun and happiness (I couldn’t even begin to put a price on the value of those things for all that attend) but on top of that we see, amongst a myriad qualities on display, outstanding logic from our autistic campers, unwavering kindness from our campers with Down’s Syndrome and throughout all we see a resolve to overcome adversity that I’m yet to experience anywhere else. Don’t tell me people with learning disabilities aren’t productive people Philip.

There’s an irony in the timing of all this for me. Last Saturday I was in Oxford welcoming new volunteers and new campers to our 2011 holidays. I got talking to the mother of one of our new campers who was candid in her concerns for her son. He had been offered two years of a college education but upon coming up to the end of his first year recently had been informed that the service would no longer be available to him. With a little guidance and support the young man in question was learning and contributing, through his part-time job, but will now be left with nothing to turn his skills to.

Perhaps then if the Conservative Party was serious about extending the rights of people with disabilities they could begin by asking their colleagues in charge of Oxfordshire County Council why they are callously removing basic educational opportunities for people with learning disabilities and in doing so denying people the chance to live full and empowered lives before they’re even old enough to qualify for the full National Minimum Wage.