All-Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness

Meeting with Maria Eagle MP, Minister for Disabled People

Date & Time: Tuesday 22 March 2005, 4.00 - 5.00pm.
Location: Committee Room 8, Committee Corridor, Palace of Westminster
Chair:Lord Ashley of Stoke, President, APPG on Deafness
Contact: Jonathan Isaac, Director UK Council on Deafness and Clerk to the APPG on Deafness

Verbatim Record

The meeting started at 4.00pm

Jonathan Isaac: Our Chair, Malcolm Bruce MP, sends his apologies as he is unable to be with us today.

Tom Levitt: I am Tom Levitt, vice-chairman of the group. Now that the Minister is here, we will take the advantage of starting and hope that Jack and others will come and join us when they get back from the division in the Lords. I have great pleasure in inviting Maria Eagle to address us on matters relating to deaf people.

Maria Eagle: That’s a rather broad agenda! I wanted to say a little bit about BSL recognition and the projects that we have funded arising out of that announcement, and I also understand that there is an interest in Access to Work. I was tipped off that there is some interest in Access to Work in the group, so it might be helpful if I say a little bit about where we are with that. I also want to say something about how the legislative developments that the Disability Discrimination Bill represent will impact on deaf people, and what new opportunities the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit Report, published recently, entitled Improving the life chances of disabled People, gives us for making the rights that we are legislating for into more of a reality in deaf and disabled people’s lives in the future.

That should keep us going for a little while. First of all, BSL recognition took place two years ago. It seems lake that time has gone past very quickly, and in many ways its something I am particularly proud of having done, because it was a little something that I as an Under Secretary felt I could do that was important. When you are an Under Secretary, you don’t necessarily get the same chance as a Secretary of State to change policies or do big things. You have to be content with making improvements in an area where it might not have happened without you, and this is one such. There was not necessarily a recognition across Government when I came to this issue that it was something worth doing, recognising BSL. I came to realise that the recognition of BSL was as much a matter of esteem for deaf people as it was practical improvement, and that esteem is tremendously important, and having proper respect for people’s culture and for their view of themselves is important in making progress towards equality.

So I thought it was worth doing for that reason. I also think that the money we were able to find, and it was £1.5 million of new resources to support that statement, should leave a lasting legacy when the money is spent and the projects are finished that will boost both the usage of BSL and the opportunities that people in this country have, both to learn BSL and the opportunities that people have to use it more widely, currently constrained I think in part by a lack of people who can interpret, and I am told constrained also by a lack of tutors to teach BSL. Both these will be assisted by some of the projects that have been funded out of the £1.5 million, so I hope that that money will leave a lasting legacy that will boost not only the availability of BSL to learn for those who wish to learn it and currently can’t find tutors to teach them, but also some of the projects are about explaining to the rest of society the importance of BSL. The fact that it is a language, and I hope that the £1.5 million will make a lasting impression there as well. Now, the projects have started, but they haven’t finished. They will, of course, be evaluated when they have finished, and at that stage I think we will want to then consider what more needs to be done, and what more can be done, in taking forward this improvement that we are trying to see.

I also wanted to say a little bit about recognition of sign languages in Europe, because I think that the fact that the Council of Europe doesn’t recognise Sign Languages in its charter for recognising minority languages is a bit of an affront actually to European sign languages, and it is something that I would like to see rectified over time, but its not something the Government can rectify. We can support its rectification through the Council of Europe’s processes, and we want to be as supportive as possible of those who wish to get the Council of Europe to put this problem right. Anything we can do to help with that, we will do.

I know that there was some wish for me to say something about Access to Work. You all know about Access to Work. It’s one of the main specialist disability employment programmes that the Department for Work and Pensions runs to assist disabled and deaf people to overcome the barriers they face in the work place, to participate in the work place. Now, since 1997, a number of people who have been able to use Access to Work has trebled and the budget has similarly increased. Which is a good thing. Also, currently just under 20% of those who use Access to Work are deaf people who use it for communication support of one kind or another. So there is no doubt about the fact that this programme makes a real difference to individuals wanting to access the work place, and I think its one of our best specialist disability employment programmes. Which is not to say that its perfect, and its not to say that it couldn’t be improved in various ways. I am sure some of you will want to say something to me about that.

The improvements we have made in disability civil rights, the extension of obligations on employers to make reasonable adjustments increasingly means that deaf people don’t have to rely just on Access to Work, because communication support can be a reasonable adjustment. So I think that there are now other ways in which we can make sure deaf people get proper support in the work place, because of the improvements we have made to our civil rights legislation.

Some of you might have had a look at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit Report on improving the life chances of disabled people. This is a cross-Government white paper, so it is a cross-Departmental policy document committing the Government to the policies within it. It emphasises very much independent living, employment, supporting families with disabled children, and the transition for young disabled people from school to adult life and to the working life. I think its got some extremely important recommendations in it, and some quite revolutionary ideas about full equality, which if we can implement will make a huge difference to disabled people’s lives in the future, and it will transform the life chances of individuals. I know that there has been some concern expressed about the timescale, because its a strategy for a 20-year period, and obviously we all want to get going straightaway. That timescale doesn’t mean we won’t do anything for 19 years and then in the last year we’ll do it all. We’re going to get started this year in, for example, piloting the concept of individualised budgets, putting together lots of support that disabled people and deaf people currently get from a whole range of different Government bodies into one place, and giving them more control over how that is spent. I think there are some really exciting opportunities there to both make better use of existing resources, because too much Government money is currently spent assessing people in lots of different places and then telling them why they can’t have the support that they needed.

If we can get through that culture of each individual department or local government department separately assessing people for their own budget, a little bit of a budget, when if you put it all together and had one assessment, it would be much more coherent and we would get better value for money. If we can get some of that working properly, it can make a tremendous difference, not only to individuals who will have more control of the support that they get, and more say in what they need, but it will also be better value for money because we won’t be wasting money on multiple assessments, we will be spending it on providing support.

There are some tremendously exciting opportunities in there for both Government and disabled people and deaf people themselves to feed in to this process of change in a positive way that will enable us to transform people’s lives, much more than we have been able to do so far. It’s an exciting prospect. I don’t underestimate the institutional difficulties that we face, institutional objections and blockages to this kind of radical way of looking at things. Everybody has their own vested interests, and we are going to have to break through those barriers, but I think its potentially a tremendously important document that could really open up opportunities for disabled people, in a way we haven’t seen before, and I hope that that’s what it achieves.

I know that many of you will have questions that you want to ask me about various things, but perhaps that just sets the scene. Maybe I will just finish off by saying that we have the second reading of the Disability Discrimination Bill in the House of Commons tomorrow. I will be winding up the debate, I am glad to say, and you might feel like its been a long time coming, but its a good Bill, and I hope that it will pass. I have no indication that anything other than it passing will be the outcome. Even if we have this much muted early election that everybody is talking about, I still think this Bill will pass. It has a wide measure of support across political parties, and across both Houses, and it can only be stopped if somebody wants to stop it, and I haven’t found anybody who wants to stop it yet.

Lord Ashley: Thank you very much indeed, Maria. I would like to endorse what Maria has said about the latest Bill, because many peers here in the House of Lords have made major contributions to that Bill, changed it fairly substantially. I am very proud of it now. The Government is pushing it as strongly as it possibly can. We just have to pray and hope there’s no delay, and we don’t lose it with a General Election, but we are very optimistic indeed. I am very glad Maria mentioned the Council of Europe and the challenge we have for the recognition of sign language. The Access to Work scheme is absolutely invaluable. I didn’t know that nearly 20% of people who use it are deaf. That is a good figure and a great benefit for deaf people. Finally on the Strategy Unit, its a great report by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, its imaginative, its strong, its powerful, and I think its well worth backing and fighting for. I am very glad Maria will be taking the lead in many ways on that. A wide spectrum of departments that we are approaching through that unit. One criticism I have is that the timescale is far too long, but we will let the Government know of our views on that as soon as it begins. Meanwhile its a marvellous report, very well written indeed. In fact there is a meeting of the people who wrote it, of the All Party Sisability Group, at five o’clock to discuss the issues, so questions and comments please. Maria would like questions and comments.

Lord Morris: It was 30 years ago, Jack, that the Institute of Hearing Research came into existence, not least because of your work in campaigning to enact that part of the of the Disabled Persons Act. Maria, how closely does the Department liase with the Institute? Is there anything more that can be done to press things forward? One hears far too little about the achievements of the Institute and I think its a very important resource for people with hearing impairments.

But even more important than that, I would like to take this opportunity of thanking Maria, as one who has some experience of legislating on disability as a minister and a private member, on her remarkable achievements in getting the Disability Discrimination Bill now to the very point of Royal Assent. Very few people can appreciate the extent of her achievement, and Maria, I am sure all of us in the disability movement very warmly appreciate what you have done and congratulate you upon it.

Maria Eagle: Thank you, I won’t rest until we’ve got Royal Assent. There is no point assuming that you are there until you are. I am optimistic, but vigilance is important in respect of these matters, but I am very optimistic we will get this Bill. You are right, we don’t get that many Disability Discrimination Bills and we need to make the best of them when we do. I, for one, don’t think its quite the end of the civil rights road. There are still some gaps, and although I would argue that it fulfils our manifesto commitment, there are some issues, particularly in respect of housing and independent living where there is still more work that is needed. That doesn’t have to be done through a civil rights framework. It can be done through other frameworks as well, but I do think there are still some issues that require attention, and certainly during the passage of the Bill through the House of Lords, we made undertakings to take some work forward in respect of housing, on common parts, for example, in which the disability rights task force didn’t really address, understandably because its hideously complex, in terms of how you actually divide up obligations and costs and rights in the context of housing law.

But I do think there are still some issues that need to be taken a bit further. It is a bill that we can all be proud of, and I its finished up better than it started off, and at the very least thereafter we are going to have to consolidate some of the legislation, because it is now fairly difficult to read, which I don’t think assists people’s understanding. Its one of those things, the concept is so simple, equality. Its so simple to say and to understand its meaning. Once you get into the nitty gritty of the law, it can become quite complicated. Its not in anybody’s interests that we remain with a suite of laws that you have to be good at jigsaw puzzles to put together. So I do think there is an issue about consolidation of the legislation at some point as well. But thanks, Alf, for those words.

In respect of your earlier point, one of the most frustrating parts of being a junior Minister in one Department, with a cross-Government reach and responsibilities that actually go across Government, is how to have an influence and a reach across other departments. In part, this was what the Strategy Unit document was about trying to build, because I can be fully on top of what’s going on in the Department for Work and Pensions but its much harder for me to influence or be on top of what’s happening in the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills. The horizontal mechanisms for influence aren’t as good as the vertical ones. Its an institutional problem you have as a Minister, when you have a cross-Departmental responsibility or reach, when you pull these levers they don’t work in other Departments, only your Department. We have to overcome that if we are going to join up government for disabled people. Where we have a report where we have a number of Departments joined together to say we are committed to all of this. Plus a mechanism in the Office for Disability Issues which needs to be built up and strengthened, will give us more of a way of influencing these big cross-Departmental issues, which affect people’s lives.

One of the reasons why we are so incoherent on the ground in terms of individual disabled people’s lives, my department has its budget, has its assessment, DfES has one, local government services have their budgets from the Department of Health and their assessments. One of the reasons why its like that is because Government works vertically, not horizontally. We have to break through that if we are going to really change life chances for disabled people as the Strategy Unit report says we must. That is going to be the big, big challenge in my view in the next Parliament.

Jill Jones: The Deaf Ex-Mainstreamers group, who I represent, have just concluded our Best Value Review about deaf education, and that’s in the UK and also in Scandinavia. The main finding was that there is an urgent need for BSL within education. The Deaf Ex-Mainstreamers group is pushing for that as an important part of the language plan, as has happened in Sweden, Norway, et cetera. At the moment, the Education Bill that went through in 2004, and was discussed in the House of Lords on March 4th in 2005, it was asked that BSL would be included within that law. Can you offer any support with that? How do we make sure that BSL is involved in that, is part of that Bill, or subsequent education legislation? How do we make sure that happens? That’s my first question. Secondly, the BSL advisory panel, and thank you very much for setting that up, it was very good, and has achieved an awful lot, but DEX feels that DfES should be hosting that panel, and as we said before, talking about the report, Improving the Lives of Disabled People, that you mentioned, 5.8 talked about children in the work force -- should be capable of meeting the needs of disabled children. And also, because BSL and interpreter courses are involved in further education, in higher education, also DEX wants to be a member of that Advisory Panel to try and encourage best practice. Its a deaf-led user organisation as well, so again can you support or advise us on that?

Lord Ashley: Can I just say that those are important questions, and Maria will answer them, but I think in view of the limited time, if questions and answers can be briefer, we can have a chance of other people coming in, because many people are trying to catch my eye. They won’t do that if we have long questions and long answers.

Maria Eagle: On the points about how to influence DfES, if you want to write to me about what you would like to be involved in, I will feed that in at Ministerial level. But its essentially about getting them to take you seriously as people who should be consulted, and to plug in to the right places. I will assist with that if I can, if you give me more details of which groups you would like to go on, and I will pass that through at a ministerial level. In terms of BSL in education, there are two or three things. This is an argument that still has to be won with DfES. And I think there are a number of constraints that they would be concerned about. One is the capacity for BSL teaching and interpretation. Because even when we are trying to make a reasonable adjustment at a conference and get BSL interpreters along, it isn’t always easy. So if you were thinking about teaching BSL in schools, the capacity that you would need to build is enormous. That raises issues for DfES about cost, for schools about cost. About the availability of enough trained people to do it. I would be interested to know what you think. There are also issues about the routes to competence in BSL, the academic route, the technical route. Whether they are as good as they can be, and curricula and all of that.You have to see progress in all of these areas if you are going to reach that aspiration.

Tom Levitt: If I can speak on behalf of Rosy and myself for the moment, we were very proud to be members of the Scrutiny Committee on the present Bill, and Maria told me just before the meeting started that the Government has now accepted more than 80% of the recommendations that we made, and that’s really quite an achievement on our behalf as well as the Government.

I wanted to come back to this question of horizontal influence across Government Departments, because in terms of reasonable adjustments and access to services, there is probably no issue like deafness whereby awareness training of frontline staff can do most towards opening the doors and removing the barriers that are presently closed, because most of them are awareness and attitudinal barriers. Given that we have current legislation and also an Equalities Bill coming on in the pipeline as well, is there a coherent approach across Government Departments in terms of delivering frontline services, to make sure that awareness training, and in particular deaf awareness training, is available to frontline staff?

Maria Eagle: Whilst you might get coherence, it wouldn’t necessarily be the same in every Department. Departments all have different cultures and different ways of doing things. They are all currently concerned about money, because of their spending review settlements, so that will be at the forefront of their mind. But the Public Sector duty to promote equality of opportunity in the Bill, which will be implemented, means they have to think about how what they do impacts on disabled people and deaf people, and if they don’t, they’re going to get shamed by the DRC, or individuals may take them to court. So I think the impetus, once the Bill is passed, on the Public Sector to do better, and to be exemplars is going to be hugely increased. That said, I am absolutely certain that various Departments, probably including my own, will make mistakes and will be found to have got it wrong at times and in places. We just have to realise we are trying to take society forward as a whole, and we have to learn from mistakes that we make and improve, and we have to be constructive in that sense. So I hope the answer to your question is "yes", but I am not promising that there won’t be issues and concerns that are raised that will look pretty awful when we look at them.

Asif Iqbal: I am a Trustee of UK Council on Deafness. I feel there are no deaf people from ethnic minorities represented. That is my first concern. And also with BSL recognition, BSL has now been recognised in law, does the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit address that?

Maria Eagle: Well, I understand the first point that you make. The recognition doesn’t overnight make BSL used more widely. Its a stepping stone to greater esteem for the language, to greater recognition that it is a language, and to improved availability through the £1.5 million funding for tutors and opportunities to learn, and we have to use it as a stepping stone to go forward. Its not the end of the story. Its a stepping stone on the route to greater awareness, to greater opportunities to learn and to use BSL, for the deaf community.

For the Strategy Unit, some of the recommendations as they apply in this area will be helpful, but we also need to improve the capacity of our society to provide interpretation, to provide teaching, and we also need to increase the awareness, as Tom said, amongst the rest of society about the importance of this issue. We are not there yet. We have got to use it as a stepping stone to go forward.

Tom Fenton: I am from the Royal Association for Deaf people. You referred to the contribution of the DDA and its extension to employers and service providers. Were you aware that Access to Work business centres are claiming that the DDA transfers significant responsibilities to employers and service employers. For example, the cost of providing sign language interpreters at staff meetings and at training events, whether internal or provided by external providers. Do you consider these reasonable or unreasonable adjustments? Would you accept that this employer’s view, 40% of my 100 workforce is deaf, that such a policy is at variance with DRC guidelines and encouragement to employers and service providers and makes the employment of deaf people completely uneconomic?

Maria Eagle: I think the concept of reasonable adjustment is deliberately flexible, and it can depend upon the circumstances and the employer as to whether sign language interpretation is reasonable in one situation as opposed to another. I suspect what they are getting at, and remember Access to Work was devised before the DDA, is that the DDA does provide what would now be seen as reasonable adjustments, as well as what would now be seen still as unreasonable adjustments. I suspect what you are encountering there is a wish from those who are administering in your area to try and make sure they focus on what others wouldn’t be expected to do rather than what they ought to be doing as good employers. That is what it sounds like, to me.

I think there is an issue, because you never have enough of a budget to provide as much as you might wish. Now that the employment provisions of the DDA do extend to all employers, even if they only employ one member of staff, the small firms exemption is gone. We do have to concentrate the minds of employers on making reasonable adjustments. In the circumstances you describe, large numbers of deaf people being employed by smallish employer with perhaps not masses of resources, it could still be an unreasonable adjustment. Access to Work is there to provide for that kind of thing. However I can see why my staff might not want to use Access to Work for providing reasonable adjustments.

Chris Underwood: I am from the RNID. At the moment, Access to Work doesn’t cover voluntary work, as I understand it, despite the fact that it is a critical route into full-time and paid employment for many deaf and hard of hearing people because it gives them an opportunity to develop skills, experience, improvements in confidence. Are there any plans to rectify that?

Maria Eagle: That’s easy. We don’t have any current plans to extends Access to Work to volunteers. You wont like it, but that’s the case.

Tom Levitt: We did raise this in the scrutiny committee.

John Walker: I am here on behalf of ASLI, the Association of Sign Language Interpreters. I am very, very happy that we have achieved BSL recognition, and I would like to congratulate you for that. Obviously something that always comes up is the lack of available interpreters, and this £1.5 million has been made available to work on that, but its actually not been provided to the interpreting profession to increase the numbers of interpreters, so in the last two years the numbers have not been increasing. I am wondering if you have any plans to set up any additional training courses to address the need for more interpreters being available?

Maria Eagle: The way in which we spent the £1.5 million, which we could probably have spent many times over by the way, was to establish the advisory group that was referred to earlier, and ask deaf people and their organisations what they thought the priority ought to be for this money, what it would be best to spend it on. We accepted their advice that boosting the number of BSL tutors and increasing the awareness in society of the need for BSL, those were the two priorities that we were told were the most important. We then, because its public money, had to go through a procurement exercise, inviting bids for projects that would achieve those two objectives. Advertising in the European Journal and all of that. We then awarded the money in various differently sized chunks to the projects that we thought best did achieve those objectives. The projects have started but not finished, and we have to evaluate them at the end of the process. But I believe that they will prove to have been valuable. Then we’ve got to consider what to do next. We have provided a little bit more money since then, I think for various projects, to try and increase the number of interpreters. I think RNID have had a little bit, I am told. I don’t know the full details. But there has been a little bit of extra support, but the money that was put aside went on the projects that I have described, and we have to hope that that will have a good impact.

Bencie Woll: I am Professor of sign language and deaf studies at City University. I am involved in one of the consortium projects. We have a concern about what happens to the work of the project following the end, and I think it probably concerns all of the other projects as well. We have set up a website. We have got three years further funding from higher education funding council of England to specifically develop work in relation to university level courses teaching BSL, which should in the end begin to produce more interpreters. But clearly, in order to maintain the impact and content of materials, there needs to be ongoing funding. I wonder if you have anything to say about how one can approach that problem?

Maria Eagle: I am very encouraged to hear you have got some further funding out of an educational-type funding stream, because that’s great. Really, should it be the Department for Work and Pensions that’s providing this kind of funding? That, to me, is already some kind of legacy that’s happened out of this, if you managed to persuade some of the more mainstream funding streams they should be thinking about this. I think that the rest of Government needs to take its responsibilities seriously, as well as DWP. I think that the Bill and the public sector duty to promote, and the way in which the public sector, whether its Whitehall Departments, local government, health services or whoever, are having to think about this, will promote that greater awareness to make sure we can get some money from other places, as well as just from DWP to take these things forward. We have all got to work hard on that. We do need legacies out of this money. I haven’t got a lot of spare money in my budget at the moment. I can tell you that for free! So we do need to make sure that we mainstream this kind of support from other government departments as well as from DWP, but I am encouraged to hear that.

Ian Croft: I am from the British Society of Hearing Aid audiologists. I am sure you will be pleased to know that the Access to Work scheme works quickly in providing hearing aids and assistive devices for many who use it. Unfortunately, many more people don’t know its even available, and there is no general policy across the country as to which route they should be taking. Each office seems to be a law unto itself. I was just wondering if our Society could work with you to help try and provide a better platform, so that more people would have access to better-quality service quicker.

Maria Eagle: There is always a difficult balance between local discretion to meet a particular need in an area as opposed to national control and guidelines, As you know, if you work on the health side of things, there is always a bit of an issue about that. I am very happy to hear from anybody who wants to tell me how we can use our Access to Work money better and more effectively. If you would like to write to me, I would be very happy to take up what you have suggested and perhaps you could meet with some of my officials and we could look at that.

Lord Ashley: I wonder, Maria, could you take up that suggestion by offering guidance from your Department about this, because for people who don’t know, you see some wonderful advertisements about the new DDA, wonderful full-page advertisements. If you could do something similar, but on a different scale, it would be very helpful to deaf people.

Maria Eagle: Yes. Its not advertising like that, but we do have information available at places where people go to look for assistance with work, that mentions Access to Work, and our staff who assist, our disability employment advisers and now personal advisers in Job Centre Plus all know about Access to Work. Whilst I admit that we don’t advertise it in national newspapers and would rather spend the money in providing some assistance, we do have information at levels where it ought to make an impact. But I do understand the point that you make.

Lord Ashley: What I would like to do is to thank Maria for a splendid contribution. I think there is nothing better than asking questions of a Minister and getting a statement from a Minister. In that way, you can hold them to account, and today has been a fascinating exchange. I have not seen it like this before for a long while, certainly not on deafness. I congratulate Jonathan on organising the meeting. And Maria is doing a wonderful job as Minister for Disabled People. The whole picture has radically changed for people in Britain, and hopefully there is more to come, but I am not going to be party political and forecast who is going to win the next election! I hope there is much more to come. Thank you, Maria. Thank you for contributing. We are very grateful. Thank you very much.

The meeting ended at 5.00pm

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