Why did Labour publish a report on disability that’s inaccessible to many people with learning disabilities?

By Kaliya Franklin

Last June the Labour party announced they had appointed an independent taskforce, led by Sir Bert Massie, to write a report looking at ways to break the links between disability and poverty. The report was published yesterday, without a press release, on Labour’s policy submission site. This was a report commissioned and requested by the Labour party, which has been produced by volunteers who have given huge amounts of their time, for free, with the hope of being able to make sensible policy suggestions to improve the lives of disabled people.

Despite this being a report about disabled people, written by a team led by and including disabled people there is not an easy read version available. I can only apologise profusely for this lack of accessible information for the one million people with learning disabilities who are eligible to vote. We did not forget any of you. An easy read version was requested some weeks ago, and quotes provided to the Labour Party. The cost of putting the report recommendations into an easy read format was approximately £250-£300 – hardly in Liam Byrne “there’s no money” territory.

The provision of accessible information tells people what an organisation thinks of them. Providing proper accessible information says ‘we value you, and its really important to us that you have the same information as everyone’. Not providing that access, especially in a report about disabled people, by disabled people, commissioned to break the links between poverty and disability demonstrates a disdain for those disabled people.

These are of course all the same disabled people that Labour would like to vote for them.

If you would like to read the report, but require a different access format such as easy read then you need to contact the Labour party directly and request one. The contact details are here

This is an extract of a longer piece – you can read the full post by Kaliya Franklin here.