Debate on the Address

My Lords, when I climbed up to the back of the Chamber the other day, the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, commented that I was brave to climb up all those steps. ““Not half as brave as I’ll need to be to open my mouth,”” I replied. My apprehension is tempered by my recollection of the warm and friendly welcome I have received from all your Lordships from the moment I entered this House—indeed, from before I did so. I hope I may count on your Lordships’ continued understanding for at least a few minutes longer. I place on record my appreciation for all the help and support I have received, both from your Lordships and from the staff of the House, which persuades me that there are few problems of access which cannot be overcome. In particular, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Manchester, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, who supported me at my introduction into the House on 11 July and are both here today, the noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton, Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers, and all those noble Lords who have been kind enough to take the time and trouble to guide me through your Lordships’ proceedings. Parenthetically, if I had just one message I could give sighted people about the blind, it would be that blind people can manage stairs. Though hailing originally from Scotland, where I spent the early part of my life, I have been exiled in England for the past 40 years, the last 16 of them in Dalston, whence I have taken my title. Dalston isin Hackney, recently voted the worst place to live in England, but never so bad that the London Borough of Hackney is incapable of making it worse with the enthusiastic encouragement of the Mayor of London, the Greater London Authority, the London Development Agency and the Department for Communities and Local Government. I might be thought to be verging on the controversial were I to proceed much further down this track, but I have detected some interest among your Lordships in London planning and housing issues, and so hope that we may have an opportunity of discussing them further before too long. My appointment has rightly been described as a singular honour, and of this I am deeply conscious. What has given me greatest pleasure, however, is the way so many people have seen it as recognition not just for me, but of blind and disabled people generally. One person went so far as to say that it was ““a great honour for every blind person in the world””. However that may be, I hope I may add a little to the diversity of your Lordships’ House. In actual fact, so far as concerns me, the honour is not quite singular. There has been some speculation that I am the first blind person to sit in your Lordships’ House, but this is not the case. The late Lord Kenswood, an early president of the National Federation of the Blind, and the late Lord Fraser of Lonsdale, for many years the distinguished chairman of St Dunstan’s and the founder of Talking Books, both had wide-ranging public careers and sat in this place within living memory. With the aid of the History of Parliament Trust, I have been able to trace four more blind Peers, going back to medieval times. No one is able to say that there may not have been more. Of course, other notable blind people have occupied prominent positions in public life. We know this, in our own day, from the remarkable example of David Blunkett, whom I salute. I like also to think of Henry Fawcett—perhaps because, for the last 10 years of his life, he was MP for Hackney—who, as Postmaster-General, introduced the parcel post in the 1880s. The blind have a long tradition of independence and activism in pursuit of better conditions. The National League of the Blind, a trade union representing blind people in sheltered employment, was ahead of its time in organising a march from the north of England to London in 1920, which was instrumental in securing the Blind Persons Act of that year. Things have obviously improved for blind people since then in a number of ways, but the fact that some people are apparently undaunted by blindness should not be allowed to disguise the fact that many are severely set back by it and remain in a condition of considerable deprivation, isolation and social exclusion. Indeed, it sometimes seems as though the conspicuous success of some highly visible blind people in overcoming their disability can lead to the deleterious impact of blindness on a person’s life being downplayed in public consciousness and official thinking. This takes no account of the costs entailed, the toll taken in overcoming the difficulties or the insuperable obstacles they present for the much larger number of less visible people who are not so successful in overcoming them. There is a paradox here: 86 per cent of people questioned in a recent survey said that sight was the sense they most feared losing, but much research confirms that, in the public consciousness, disability is largely conceived of in terms of physical disability, especially that which affects mobility. This probably has to do with the fact that, though feared in the abstract, sight loss is so grossly underestimated as a likely contingency as not properly to count as a disability at all. In the same survey, over half of those questioned estimated their chances of becoming blind as less than one in 1,000, whereas for the population as a whole the chances are more like one in 60, one in 12 for those over 60 and one in six for those over 75. It would be surprising then if something of this did not translate into official policy and practice. There are two general points to be made here. First, though I have been a campaigner for inclusion and the mainstream provision of services all my life, we have to recognise that one size does not necessarily fit all. The loudest advocates of mainstream provision are usually the vocal and articulate elite who can cope best with it. We need a continuum of provision, including some specialist provision, especially in education and employment opportunities, attuned to the diverse needs of those who find disability more debilitating. Secondly, noble Lords may wonder why I have spoken so much about blindness and not about disability. The blind have some important interests in common with other disabled people—to be included in society, not to be discriminated against and to be involved in shaping their own destiny—but theyalso have important needs that are peculiar tothe condition of blindness, notably the need for information in a non-visual form and for an environment largely designed for those who can see to be mediated for those who cannot. This is no small requirement, considering how critical the sense of sight is to man’s interaction with the natural world and the world he has constructed. Couching everything in terms of disability has led to the central importance of sight being obscured in recent decades so that there is now a pressing need for blindness to be raised higher up the political and social agenda. Blindness is one of the severest disabilities, yet under the Fair Access to Care Services framework of eligibility for social services, the needs to which it gives rise are rated only moderate to low. That effectively means that the blind get no service. Although research has shown that visually impaired people have greater difficulty with independent mobility than disabled people generally, they still only qualify for the lower rate of the mobility component of the disability living allowance. Failure to bear in mind the needs of the blind reaches farcical proportions in the plan to lower pavements and remove barriers at traffic hot spots so that motorists and pedestrians will be more aware of one another and can demonstrate that awareness by means of eye contact. Technology is a great force for inclusion, and we can now access much information that was formerly a closed book, but if the needs of the blind are not kept in mind when designing new devices, it can be just as great a force for exclusion—try operating an iPod, a touch-screen or a digital radio with your eyes closed. Most worrying of all, unless someone comes up with an accessibly electronic programme guide p.d.q., digital switchover will mean digital switch-off for the visually impaired population. Ninety per cent of employers say that it would be difficult or impossible to employ someone with a visual impairment. As a result, scarcely over one-third of those of working age are in work. The proposals to move people off welfare and into work, referred to in the gracious Speech, are thus very welcome. Blind people do not want to be written off on welfare if there is a realistic prospect of their being found work, but the Pathways to Work pilots have not delivered for the visually impaired. The fact, which emerged in Committee in another place, that the £360 million allocated for rollout represents a real terms cut of40 per cent does not inspire confidence. But we want rollout to work, and we will be looking to the Government to deliver on their promises for visually impaired people. When I began my law studies over 40 years ago, someone said that where judges had to find a solution for every difficulty, academics would find a difficulty for every solution. My aim in this House will be to attempt to find solutions rather than difficulties.