Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak briefly in support of the noble Lord’s third attempt to bring forward these very important proposals. It is a special privilege because, as Bishop with responsibility for Stoke-on-Trent before being called to Winchester, I hold him in particular admiration. It is also a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. As she spoke of the noble Lord’s dogged perseverance, I thought, "It takes one to know one". I spoke yesterday in preparation for coming today with one of those responsible for the Southampton Centre for Independent Living—a major resource over the past 25 years or so for disabled people, led and run by them in my own diocese and across the centre of the south of England. That person, himself a disabled person, emphasised very strongly how urgently the centre, and organisations like it all over the country, want this Bill at last to reach the statute book. As I talked with him and thought of others that I know, I thought too of the vast amounts of money being spent to shore up the financial structures with very little assurance as to what their outcomes will be and the light that that sheds on the possibility, after all, of government being able to spend the necessary money to do this job well. I cannot pretend to expertise that I do not have, so I shall not engage in the details of the Bill; but that engagement will be important, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, noted, if the Bill is to gain its objectives. A whole series of detailed questions, of which hers were only some, must be well thought through by us in this House and the other place. I hope that is done with a sense of urgency to get the Bill through, rather than there being any kind of nitpicking that holds it up. I want simply to endorse what seem the fundamental and, as we have just heard, most important principles of independent living, set out in the noble Lord’s speech and in those that have succeeded him. I end by offering this obvious but necessary observation. It is not only right in the basic meaning of the word to meet the needs, support to the greatest possible degree the independence and secure the rights of disabled people. A great deal that the rest of us receive from people who live with disabilities—both at the individual level, among those we meet or work with or who are among our friends, and more widely economically, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, pointed out—will be further increased and deepened as people with disabilities are able more consistently to live confidently and independently and with self respect, and do not have to deliver enormous quantities of what are often limited energies in fighting for their rights and what they need.