Disabled Person's (Independent Living) Bill Second Reading
Lord Addington, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson on Disability
Lord Addington said: "The Bill is a coherent and sensible approach to getting these issues together. However, what struck me when I looked through it was that there was nothing new here. Virtually every single clause has been debated in the past five or 10 years in Parliament. I appreciate the timely reminder of the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, that we must get the Bill right technically; she does an important service to this House by saying that. But every part of the Bill has been discussed at least once, if not dozens of times, and if best practice and encouragement worked, we would not be here. That is probably the historical lesson to draw from this.
"If a voluntary approach is to work, it must be given considerably more push from government. That refers to government as a whole, not to a particular party. The amount of pushing required to get previous Conservative Governments to do work on this matter was also quite monumental at times. I know that every step of the process will get slightly easier as the weight of time and precedent comes behind it, but we still have to push pretty hard. I hope that the people at the top of government -the politicians in charge at the moment- realise that they must take the whole machine, bang heads together and get people to co-operate. If it requires a Bill to do that, a Bill should be introduced. To bring in a little bit of politics, although it is unusual in these events, perhaps we could do without another couple of Home Office Bills, which all seem to do exactly the same thing as the Bills from seven or eight years ago. Possibly then we might get a bit more room for these types of measures. I leave that one sitting as the elephant in the room -but we must ensure that we give enough time and effort to this Bill.
"Noble Lords have alluded briefly to the issue of costs. At the moment, what happens is that by not doing X or Y we pay double for Z later. I am sorry for pausing -a dyslexic should never use the alphabet in his examples! By not meeting immediate costs and maintenance, you end up with a damned great repair bill later. That is effectively what is happening. Provisions for disabled people are being squeezed because they can be. Because there is not the legislative priority behind them, of course they are pushed aside. They may be brought back under other initiatives, but then they are pushed aside again. They will always be under that pressure until we get something that ensures that we tackle immediate needs head-on.
"In education debates, we have looked at the situation for those with disabilities or special educational needs and it has been established that we must have something that guarantees that the problem will be dealt with up front, in legal terms. We are rapidly approaching that situation here, because we are not addressing the problems. We would not be here again today if we had addressed those problems on previous occasions.
"Can the Minister please give us some idea how the Government intend to introduce a process, or a line of thought, to ensure that all these bits of best practice are referred to in guidance -the sop offered in so many discussions in Parliament- and introduced? If we do not get such assurance or a plan to work to, we will have to return with further Bills. Should we have to do that? We are not going to go away. We know that the Government will have to give in and give us something. Why not do it quickly so that we can all go on and do something else?"