Official Report 235KB pdf
Good morning and welcome to the seventh meeting in 2006 of the Equal Opportunities Committee. I remind all present that mobile phones should be turned off, as they interfere with the sound system. I have apologies from John Swinburne. Jamie McGrigor and Nora Radcliffe will be a bit late.
I am Highland Council's disability sport development officer. I work in conjunction with the charity group Highland Disability Sport and will try to represent as many of its views as I can.
I am the director of Artlink, which provides a range of services for people with disabilities who are involved in the arts.
I am head of sports and service development at Edinburgh Leisure, which is a trust organisation that manages all the City of Edinburgh Council's leisure services.
I retired from Fife Council last Sunday, but I am the chair of Scottish Disability Sport and the president of Disability Sport Fife, which I am here to represent. My work is on physical activities for people with disabilities.
So you have not retired from that.
I have not.
That is good.
I work with Project Ability, which is a Glasgow-based organisation that works in the visual arts with people who have a range of disabilities. We provide studio spaces, workshops and a gallery where people can exhibit their work.
I am the chief executive of North Ayrshire Leisure Ltd, which is a leisure trust, a company limited by guarantee and a recognised Scottish charity. We operate leisure centres, golf courses and outdoor sports and ancillary services on behalf of North Ayrshire Council for the community as a whole in North Ayrshire.
I am the sports co-ordinator for Lothian Disability Sport, which is a charity and voluntary organisation that is a branch of Scottish Disability Sport. I will represent the views of those with disabilities in Lothian who take part in sport.
I am the artistic director of Birds of Paradise Theatre Company, which is an inclusive touring theatre company that employs disabled and non-disabled actors. We also do outreach work with disabled and non-disabled young people and, obviously, have inclusive audiences.
I am part of the management team that manages West Dunbartonshire Council's three leisure centres.
I hope that all the witnesses enjoy this morning's session. I look forward to our discussion.
We have established a good partnership relationship with FABB Scotland, which is a disability organisation. We have sourced funding to allow FABB Scotland to provide support workers, to ensure that our leisure provision for young people on Friday evenings is as inclusive as possible. We have 20 to 30 places for young people with higher support needs, which are supported by staff from FABB Scotland and funded through the Big Lottery Fund. We have done good partnership work to ensure that our programme is as inclusive as possible.
In Fife, we have the image project, which is funded by the Big Lottery Fund and is aimed specifically at children and young people with physical, sensory and learning disabilities. We set out to provide physical activity options for children at lunch time, after school, at the weekend, in the evenings and during holidays throughout the year, in all communities. Part of the money was used to employ a facilitator one day a week. We engaged with physical education teachers in schools and head teachers to identify where the children were. We then met them and their families to decide what they wanted to participate in. We identified leaders and facilities and set up funding mechanisms. As the programme is funded through the Big Lottery Fund, we hope that it will be sustainable after May 2007, when the funding runs out.
What success do you have in attracting participants to the sessions?
Some groups started with four or five children, but all the groups are successful, in that children attend them. Before groups were set up, we had to identify an existing need or interest. We have tried to set up groups in challenged communities and places where opportunities would not normally exist in the mainstream community.
We are involved with several initiatives. We have been involved with the North Ayrshire Sports Association for the Disabled, a voluntary organisation that has been on the go for 15 or 20 years, to increase participation in sport by people from a variety of age groups and with various disabilities.
I will talk about the arts access service that we provide for people with a range of disabilities, which enables them to go to arts events in Edinburgh and Lothian. I want to highlight the service for two reasons. First, it is purely person-centred; it is based on the individual's interests and meets their particular support needs. Secondly, we are considering areas in which there are still major barriers, such as those experienced by deaf and hard of hearing audiences. We found it interesting, but not altogether surprising, that there are still major barriers for those people to overcome.
We started an initiative in West Dunbartonshire called shining stars, which is for children aged 4 to 15. Initially, we intended to get children to participate in physical exercise in two-hour sessions during the school holidays at Easter, in the summer and in October. We have now progressed to providing a four-week block of skills-development sessions. West Dunbartonshire Council funds the initiative, which has been so successful that the council has expanded it to involve 16 to 24-year-olds. In this financial year, the council is continuing to fund the initial shining stars project as well as the new project. We are consulting groups to find out what kind of activities young people in those age groups would like to participate in.
We are trying to develop a stepping-stone approach. Birds of Paradise Theatre Company has a professional, national tour, for which we employ disabled and non-disabled performers. We think that that is a great platform for our vision of inclusion. However, we encounter a problem in finding those performers: where do they go to get professional training? We are working with schools to encourage young people to believe that, although they might have a disability, they can still consider a career in the performing arts. We are also working with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as a training provider to make it more inclusive. We are trying to develop stepping-stone projects, such as community tours, to give folk more experience and, we hope, to get us more actors for our future mainstream national tours.
Has it been problematic for the tutors involved to provide training and experience?
Yes. We are working on that at different levels. We are working with schools to find young people who want to do stuff out of school, as that can be tricky. For example, we work with Ashcraig school in Glasgow, which is a school for physically disabled young folk who come from all over, not just the city centre. That can present a problem for activities on a Saturday afternoon at the RSAMD. I offered eight young folk the opportunity to be involved this year and two of them have said that they would be interested. Some of them might have other commitments, but that shows that there is a difficulty.
You mentioned schools. Do you have any dealings with the Scottish Youth Theatre?
Yes. The SYT is the third partner in the project that we run with the RSAMD to bring together young people from Ashcraig and YouthWorks. We hope to give the SYT some training input as well.
We are most keen to work on the sustainability of activity. An example is the children and young people's programme that we have been running since about 1999, in which young people with disabilities work with professional artists. Some of those youngsters are now young adults. We are particularly proud that we have been able to sustain that programme and, for example, to help those young people to exhibit their work at a national level in the Glasgow art fair, which they did for the first time this year. They have been able to develop good visual arts skills. That sustainability is also a feature of our mental health project, which is a partnership with Greater Glasgow NHS Board. It is important that people know that they will have long-term support for developing skills.
Last year, Highland Disability Sport managed to secure some funding to create a sport-specific coaching development programme for people with learning disabilities to take part in the sport of their choice, leading up to the special Olympics last year. The programme, which ran well, paid for coaching and transport, so that the athletes could travel to coaching events. The legacy of that is our sport-specific groups, which are run by specialist coaches. With the funding and transport issues that arise from keeping groups together, the hardest part now is to try to continue that work.
A number of people have mentioned the funding issue, and Anne Knowles has highlighted sustainability. Are there challenges with funding or with providing services for people with disabilities?
There are challenges with funding. Some of the young people with disabilities with whom we aim to engage might have high support needs—in relation to the number of staff required, for example. As a trust organisation, we struggle to provide staff with the right level of experience and to cost that into our budget. Funding for staff is definitely an issue.
There are huge challenges represented by sustainability issues and the resources required. It is all very well for people such as us, whose particular focus is on the needs of people with disabilities, to talk about our experiences, but working with mainstream organisations, whose focus might not be people with disabilities, is more difficult. Such organisations have a range of other priorities that they need to meet and find it much more difficult to recognise what the specific needs are and how they might address and resource them. That is a huge issue.
You talked about working with mainstream organisations. Do you find that they are aware of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995? Do you find that you spend your time not only helping the people you want to encourage but explaining the DDA and training issues to other organisations?
Yes. At the moment we are having an exchange of views with the Edinburgh Playhouse on its charging policy for people with disabilities. For example, people in a wheelchair can use only a certain area of the Playhouse, which also attracts the highest cost. It is impossible for those individuals to access other, cheaper seats within the auditorium. We are considering whether we can challenge that under the DDA. We are also considering the training issue. There is knowledge of the DDA there, but in fairly simplistic terms.
People often phone us, expecting that we will know the answers to their questions. We try our best to answer as many questions as we can, but they cover a wide range. Some people might ask us a precise question about whether it is okay to ask a personal assistant to do such and such. Other folk ask what sort of language they should use if they are working with X. We have a new campaigning post that is one-year funded—we are constantly looking for money to fund such posts—and involves reaching out to other mainstream theatre organisations and encouraging them to consider inclusive practice. Even in the early stages, some interesting issues have been raised. Folk say that they are interested in having a conversation, but it is unclear what actual changes they will make beyond that.
There is never enough money to go round. If we say that the primary barrier is finance, we will make no progress. However, Fife Council and, I am sure, other councils offer a 50 per cent reduction for people with disabilities and have a carers-go-free policy. Most local authorities have implemented policies of that sort. One mistake that we make is often to give that section of the population things for free, which means that sustainability becomes an issue. We have always adopted the policy of having a 50 per cent reduction, so that there is a payment from stage 1. There is also a notion that transport must always be provided and that it is a real killer.
Richard Brickley has put the issue in slightly simplistic terms. It is incredibly important that we work in partnership, but we must recognise that transport is a huge issue for people. We cannot say that by working together we will overcome the problem, because I do not think that that stands up.
When we took evidence, it became apparent to us that there are different levels of provision and access in different areas. The issues of transport and finance were raised throughout the country, but there were specific issues in specific areas. A very accessible programme in one council area might not be available in another area just across the road. Do organisations have enough opportunity to discuss issues? The committee has been thinking about that point. How do we disseminate the best practice that each organisation has told us about today?
It is incredibly important. It is possible to focus too much on transport or finance issues when the real issue is our society's attitude towards people with disabilities. Once we start to understand that we must look at services from a disabled person's perspective, we will start to move forward.
I have been working with various agencies in Lothian—the local authorities and other organisations, whether voluntary or not. When they set out their strategy, they can put down on paper where they would like their provision to go; that looks really good and ticks all the right boxes, but the problem comes at the delivery end. People are coming forward who would like to be involved in coaching, but there is maybe not the link to deliver the expertise over again, or there may be barriers to—in sport—good coaches being involved. When the coaches are asked to become disability awareness trained or to work with a specific group, an element of fear comes in. That may happen for a variety of reasons, many of which are to do with lack of understanding of the issues. That is a huge problem for us to overcome. Even if money is available, if no people are coming forward who have a good understanding of the issues and are willing to listen and adapt, it does not matter how much money we throw at the situation.
One of the problems with the arts is their status among other activities. Those of us who work in the area have seen the evidence and are convinced of the intrinsic importance of the arts to the individual's well-being in all areas of their life. Often, however, when times get hard, that is the area that everybody thinks is dispensable. I would argue that that is wrong. We have seen people become self-confident and able to look after themselves much better simply because they have gained a feeling of achievement and worth by taking part in such activities. We must try to change people's attitudes and minds at all levels, from the Parliament right down to the grass roots, about what those activities can offer the individual.
Going back to the notion of getting folk together in a forum to talk about good practice, I would be keen that that should not just involve us patting ourselves on the back. If the forum were outward looking and enabled us to communicate with other organisations, that would be worth while.
Networking is very important. There are formal and informal ways of networking. I sit on a group of leisure managers from local authorities in Scotland. It started off with half a dozen of us meeting every couple of months to talk about good and bad practice and how not to reinvent the wheel. We now have 16 local authorities represented on the group as well as sportscotland, Quest and the Institute of Leisure and Amenity Management. The group is not formal, but we meet every couple of months and have discussed disability issues many times. If the will exists, it is possible to contact people and organise such forums—I have proved that it can be done. We share all sorts of practice and the group is very good. People just have to make the effort. I do not know whether the Executive might want to take the lead in that regard.
Some of us worked with local authorities in those kinds of fora 20 years ago—I am showing my age—around disability and access to sport. However, disabled people are telling the committee that the barriers are still there and that appears to be the case. It is good to know that people are working in that way, but how do we move forward? That was Marilyn Livingstone's question.
I return to the comment about finance and charging individuals who may be disabled for access to facilities. Like most local authorities, we operate a concessionary charging scheme. It is only right that that is done. I believe that people should pay, but that disabled people should be at some financial advantage in such a scheme. The difficulty arises with regard to the requirement to provide support staff to facilitate sessions and activities for groups.
I will widen out the question with a bit of a challenge. When we shared good practice earlier, Fiona Wernham talked about provision on Friday evenings and you mentioned a three-day annual event, so it is clear that services have not been adapted sufficiently. Disabled people—particularly young disabled people—keep telling us that they would like the chance to be spontaneous. How do we work that into provision?
That is difficult. We must endeavour to make parts of the programmes that we offer, such as holiday programmes, suitable for disabled individuals and we must aim to roll those out over a period of time. The difficulty with that is securing the dedicated resources that would allow two or three individuals to call in and use the services.
Perhaps mainstream budgets should include an element to cover the increased funding that is necessary if we are serious about equality of opportunity. What do the witnesses think about that?
I hate to mention direct payment, but I suppose that it provides the environment to give the spending power to the disabled person. I know from experience that that is fraught with huge difficulty, especially if the disabled person needs a legal structure around them to enable it to happen, because that means that the carers become finance officers. However, that system, in which the disabled person rather than the service provider makes the decision, is being explored. It is an interesting system to explore, although there are major problems with it. We need to think about who makes the decisions; ultimately, they must be made by the disabled person, not the service provider. That is incredibly important.
In the past couple of years, there has been a lot of investment in sport and leisure, particularly for young people. Edinburgh Leisure is trying to engage with people with additional support needs, which naturally means that we will have lower numbers of users and higher numbers of staff. However, that has meant that we have faced challenges with accessing funding from certain funding bodies because we are not targeting many users. It would be beneficial if some funding bodies could lose sight of high numbers and focus on quality of input. This is a great time for sport and leisure because of the amount of funding from the Big Lottery Fund and the amount of new opportunities funding. Sport and leisure have been heavily resourced, but we need to change the emphasis of some of the funding packages so that we can provide good programmes for people with additional support needs.
Nora Radcliffe's point was that there should be mainstream rather than charity provision.
In the Highlands, the geography is an obvious access barrier to spontaneous decisions to undertake activities. For example, someone might decide to go swimming, but be told that that is not possible because the pool has no trained person available to assist or because a lane is not available because a school is using it.
We are good at talking to one another on the physical activity and sports side. The umbrella body in Scotland is Scottish Disability Sport, which has a professional officers group, local authority representatives and a branch officers conference. There is a regular exchange between officers of the association and people like us who work at a local level. We share models of good practice and have regular discussions. However, we do not exchange views with our colleagues in the arts, except where local authorities have integrated services.
I was going to raise the issue of the training of staff and their attitude to people with disabilities. We have heard a lot about people wanting to access, for example, swimming pools or trampolines, but staff telling them that they cannot do so because of health and safety issues. They were using the legislation to prevent access. I wonder how prevalent such attitudes are.
Much of the discussion has been about children and young people, which is right, but we must also think about how we provide for the older disabled person who perhaps has different needs for accessing things in different ways. That is quite a challenge because it involves getting information through to people to help them make choices. We can network and talk about best practice, but the question is how we get through to the isolated person who lives on their own or to their carers that there is something there for them. We try to work closely with many of those who provide housing for people with learning disabilities, through doing workshops and training with them. We must go out much more in such tentacle ways.
I do not disagree that older people are important, but I think that the problems probably start with the treatment of younger people. The training issue applies whether we are talking about school staff, folk in leisure centres or front-of-house people in theatres. It is hard for folk to communicate and ask the most basic questions when the approach is one of separation rather than inclusion. People can feel a sense of difference and otherness.
Lottery funding has been mentioned a great deal. Obviously, I misunderstand the word "additionality". I thought that lottery funding was for extra and unusual services, rather than for support needs. There is a huge problem if lottery funding replaces mainstream funding. However, I am not complaining, because we benefit from lottery funding in quite a major way.
Many of the staff of Edinburgh Leisure do not have the necessary confidence, because they are not exposed to practical situations very often. We make disability equality training compulsory for all our staff, but there needs to be hands-on, practical training. We can give a PowerPoint presentation on disability equality, but what does that mean on the ground when a disabled person comes in? How should staff deal with that situation? There is an issue of self-confidence. We are working with Capability Scotland to repackage our training, so that it includes more practical experience and gives our staff more of the support and confidence that they seek. There are ways of doing that. We need to find and work with the people and organisations that can provide the right expertise.
When I came into local authority working and the leisure centre business in 1975, I was not allowed to take wheelchair users on to an upper floor of the facility in which I worked. We have moved forward enormously and must continue to do so. In my role with Scottish Disability Sport, I run events in leisure centres throughout Scotland. I find the staff unbelievably accommodating and very skilled. Very good programmes are being run in the centres, but there are challenges.
We have had some positive and a lot of negative feedback on attitudes. Would the witnesses like to say a bit more about the attitudes of staff towards disabled people and the provision of disability equality training for staff? Fiona Wernham made the good point that practical, hands-on training is much more important than theoretical training.
Staff in our leisure centres and other related activities are the same as the general population. Some are in tune with a variety of people, whether they are able bodied or disabled. I totally accept that some of them are a bit afraid of working with someone who is disabled. Like Edinburgh Leisure, North Ayrshire Leisure definitely does its bit on awareness training. A number of our staff are specifically trained in working with disabled people. It is beneficial that some of the sports governing bodies have included some form of disability training in their qualifications. When we employ staff to deliver sports activities, we require all of them to be qualified under the appropriate governing body of a sport. That is a benefit, as it highlights the issue of the special requirements regarding disabled sport.
I would be concerned if we looked at the issue as positive or negative. We have moved on a long way from where we were 18 years ago when I entered the field. We should not ignore that, but we should not ignore the reality that health and safety is important in relation to making appropriate risk assessments. I do not think that any corners should be cut in that regard. It is important to be realistic about the barriers that are still faced and how they affect people's experience. Health and safety can be used as an excuse, but an appropriate risk assessment can be a positive experience.
My question is on risk assessment and whether we treat everybody equally in that regard. I will use the example of a young man whom I dealt with. He was in a wheelchair and went ice skating, but one day it was decided that he posed a health and safety risk to other skaters. How much is that the result of a can't-do attitude? Should we not look at the situation with can-do eyes? There is a problem in Scotland as a whole—including in the tourism industry—with our approach to such issues.
I will let Frank Keddilty answer that.
I am confident that by far the majority of our employees are suitable for the jobs that they are doing and are capable of doing a good job at front of house. Whenever they are called on to deliver a variation from the service, by far the majority of them bend over backwards to deliver it. It is important that we encourage that attitude among our staff. I am confident that our staff deliver, although I am not saying that things cannot be improved, at times. Services can always be improved.
My comment follows on from what Frank Keddilty and Richard Brickley have said about moving on. There have been issues with staff in Highland. When I started in my role as the development officer up there, some staff were not very aware of disabled sportspeople's requirements. It is about approaching the issue positively and identifying the ways in which we can support those people.
Lothian has a similar partnership set-up with local colleges. For the past couple of years, disability has been a big part of the sports coaching development modules. The subject has been dealt with by people who work regularly with those who have disabilities. The East Lothian development officer for disabilities helps to deliver the course and he has regular hands-on contact with people with disabilities. I have also helped.
Our existing staff are very good, on the whole. When we are lucky enough to get funding from the Big Lottery Fund for one, two or three years, we have to attract good-quality staff to work under temporary contracts. However, in year 3 the local authority starts to sweat and asks what it is going to do with the project, whether it will ditch it or mainstream it, and who has the money to mainstream it. Frequently, we cannot get good-quality staff for such a short period of time. We have found that to be a great difficulty.
I have a point about the right people being in the right place at the right time. At one of our leisure centres, young people with disabilities were providing challenges for our leisure staff, to the extent that some situations arose that the staff did not know how to deal with particularly well, so interest in the programme started to go down. However, we met representatives of some voluntary organisations and special educational needs schools and tried to get people with good experience of working with those with disabilities to mentor our staff and show them how to deal with situations that might arise. They have been really supportive and accommodating.
Will you outline the provision for carers and personal support people in your organisations? Richard Brickley said that in Fife there is a carers-go-free policy for certain activities. What is the picture elsewhere?
The carers-go-free policy is now official, although it has been in place unofficially for three decades. Escorts or support people who go to a leisure centre or go into the countryside to fish or to play golf do not have to pay. However, there is an expectation that the person who is being supported requires their care. It is not a case of the individual going to one end of the gym and the carer going to the other end; the carer is there because the individual whom they are with requires their care. There are strict guidelines about what the carer should be doing. The policy applies throughout every service in Fife Council. That is not unrealistic.
Of course you can.
I have a bit of a hang-up about funding. I cannot understand why we consider the employment of individuals to be a problem or a barrier, given that the individuals coming through the door are paying for the services provided. My little, simple mind works out that if someone pays £1.50 to attend a session and it costs the provider £15 to employ somebody, the provider is washing its face. The disabled community should not be seen as a burden to local authorities. They deserve the same opportunities and services as every other section of the population, but they do not get equal access at the moment. There is no local authority provision of after-school activities or adult multi-activity groups. I cannot understand why, because people will pay for such services and the money that is collected will pay for those leading the groups. Such activities should be run through paid leaders.
I have two points to make about the carer issue. We considered a carers-go-free policy with advice from the Disability Rights Commission and we discovered that, funnily enough, allowing the carer to go free would be classed as favourable treatment and would not, therefore, fall under the auspices of the DDA. There is the interesting tension that our trying to make life easier would not necessarily be within the legislative framework.
We will stop now for a five-minute break.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
Before the meeting was suspended, Marlyn Glen was considering issues to do with carers. I ask her whether she has any other questions.
Would any of the other witnesses like to say what their organisations provide?
In West Dunbartonshire, carers go free. We have a passport scheme—the client's or customer's card flags up a message that they may come in with a carer. The carer is not named specifically and may change—it can be the mum or dad, for example. There is no charge for the carer when they come in with the client. However, I accept the point that we could consider a scheme for the carers themselves.
Edinburgh has a carers-go-free policy, too. We have gone a little further in that we have gone into partnership with VOCAL—Voice of Carers Across Lothian—which has about 4,000 registered carers throughout Edinburgh and the Lothians. We have issued each of those carers with a leisure card so that they can access mainstream gym-and-swim provision for £1. They still have to pay, but if they have some time away from their responsibilities they can access leisure facilities. The policy seems to work fairly well.
We have a range of free and concessionary access schemes for carers.
I highlight Edinburgh Playhouse's approach to carer goes free, which is a commercial promoter's approach—there is a £2 reduction on a £35 ticket. Obviously, local authorities do great work, but their attitude does not exist in other organisations.
We cannot provide a lot for carers, apart from somewhere to be, but whenever we have a trip for people, such as a sketching trip, the carers do not pay for their place on the bus. We do what we can on that.
Local organisations, voluntary groups and local authorities seem to bend over backwards to provide services, but private enterprises such as cinemas and theatres do not. We have had reports that in such places very few seats are available for carers and those that are available can be more expensive, because they are at the front, for example. Does every carer find that when they take somebody out, not to a local authority venue, but to a cinema or theatre?
One problem that I have encountered is that you might not be able to sit beside your pal. If I go with a colleague to see somebody else's show, I might not go in a caring role, but I am with them and I would like to sit beside them, but if the front row is for wheelchair users only, where do I go?
Provision varies in the private sector. You can go to a concert at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow as a companion to a person with severe mobility difficulties. Before it opened Murrayfield, the Scottish Rugby Union had a scheme to allow people to register, and it has kept that scheme going, so lots of places are available at major internationals. At local level, we are debating whether the word "carer" or "companion" should be used, because not everybody who supports somebody is described as a carer, so it is important that we use the right word.
How is the policy of who is allowed to go for free decided? How do you define a carer?
If someone takes a concessionary membership because they have disabilities or are affected by disabilities, they can tell us that they will come on occasion with a carer. We take their word for it and show on their card that they will come with a carer. That way, no matter who the carer is, they will get in for free.
So disabled people themselves decide.
Yes.
If we are looking at barriers, consistent pricing is quite a big issue. From our organisation's point of view, we need a bit of help with that, so any help that the Parliament or the Scottish Executive can give us would be incredibly useful.
Define the kind of help that you want.
It is a matter of interpreting what the barriers are. If the barriers are to do with price, supporting initiatives to lower prices or to make them fairer so that people can access theatres or cinemas will help, and it will also help to raise awareness.
My questions on carers have been answered. The only area that I feel we have not explored fully is partnership working, which I think Richard Brickley mentioned, and the issue may also tie in with support. If you have a good working relationship with social services, that might make access easier. Do any witnesses want to comment on partnership working within local authorities and between local authority social services departments and other agencies and organisations?
We have found that awareness of what is available is important because it allows organisations to know that they can approach us and that we can be flexible and can consider programmes and services. We have been proactive in working with Capability Scotland, FABB Scotland and other organisations, because we want to provide a better service for people who have disabilities. We have to drive the process of engaging with social services and day care centres because those organisations are not chapping on our door to say, "Can I come and use your leisure services, because I know that you can provide something for us?" We face the challenge of trying to raise our profile with those services so that if they want to make more people more active more often, they can come and speak to us and we can try to make that happen. We need to raise our profile with specialist services that engage with people who have disabilities so that we can work with them to provide better services.
If the provision of sport for disabled people was left solely to us, we could not do it. The bulk of our services are delivered by other organisations; we facilitate and support them to do that. Services can be provided by local groups or they can be tied in with education—through special schools—and social work.
Partnership working is absolutely essential. Paediatric physiotherapists are involved at an early stage, so health services are very much involved, as are education and social work services. Health services also become involved in the later stages of people's lives.
I agree totally with that. We cannot deliver any of the services in which we are engaged unless we work closely with social services departments and other voluntary sector bodies. The involvement of a range of disciplines in the planning of a service can occasionally lead to inactivity and some buck passing. We need to consider the number of different disciplines that can be involved in a person's life at any one time because the number can mean that very little happens. We need to recognise that reality.
I want to unpick a little the notion of partnerships. Our company has all sorts of working relationships—I call them working partnerships—with other agencies, organisations and creative groups. There is also the issue of funding partnerships. If a company such as ours always goes to social services for its funding, a question arises. What does that say about how the art world in general perceives us? We want to be part of the art world and to be judged on equal terms with others in that sphere. However, if it is difficult for us to get money from the art world, we have to engage in other funding partnerships. I do not have an answer to the question; I am simply throwing out another question that needs to be answered.
You are absolutely right. I would be interested to hear the views of other witnesses. We tend to put disabled people into the social-needs box—we see them as having a social disability and not as people who participate in things right across society.
The point is really interesting. In my early days with Project Ability, we were funded through the then Strathclyde Regional Council's social work department. I used to come up against exactly that problem; people used to say, "You are a social work client. You don't belong with us—they look after you."
I want to relate that point to Richard Brickley's point that if an organisation provides a service, it should not have to provide transport, but should be able to assume that a transport provider will do that. I am trying to get my head round that. Perhaps we do not exert enough pressure on mainstream providers to give the equality provision that they should give, because that is being picked up as part of support.
That is absolutely right. We have never taken responsibility for people's care needs. If a person needs somebody to come with them, that is fine and they are welcome, but it is not up to us to organise that. The same applies to transport. A woman from an organisation in London that does similar work to ours told me that since she started organising transport, it is all she seems to do. It is important that organisations focus on what they provide.
I agree. If I had to organise transport, I would not be able to get on with what I need to do. However, on the other hand, if I do not think about transport, young folk will not come to do our activities at all. Other people are so used to putting up barriers and saying, "That is too difficult," or, "There is a transport issue." Nora Radcliffe's point about engaging mainstream providers is related to Jan-Bert van den Berg's point about putting money back in folk's pockets, although I do not know whether there is a way to do that.
Positively speaking, it would be an interesting exercise to plan services from the point of view of the disabled person rather than from the mainstream's point of view. We could gain a huge benefit for everyone if we considered what the issues and problems are, tried to solve them and then delivered services that were accessible to all. All too often, that is not the case. Although huge strides have been made, the next step should be to start by planning and designing services from the disabled person's point of view and then to think how the services can be rolled out to society as a whole. The result would be absolutely brilliant services.
The biggest question of all is how to make Scotland more inclusive. Unfortunately, I cannot answer that, although I could make a few stabs at it.
We would like to make recommendations on that, which is why we want to pick your brains.
The Birds of Paradise Theatre Company's written evidence says that it has carried out an access audit of venues. I am interested to hear more about that because it would be worth giving some publicity to the issue. To move on to the accommodation problem and the understanding of access issues, I do not see why it would be difficult for us to ask for greater clarity in the Scottish tourist board's symbols.
One reason why we are a touring theatre company is that we think that disabled people should be out there and visible throughout Scotland. However, that raises its own issues. Venues are sometimes not 100 per cent familiar with what access means. Often, they think about access for audience members, but not backstage access, which is obviously what our actors need. I do not have a resident company, so we use different people for each show. In one case, we might have somebody who uses a wheelchair; in another, somebody may be deaf and need a visible fire alarm. There are many different access requirements. Last year, one of our disabled actors, accompanied by somebody from the technical staff, visited almost every venue that we were going to in order to find out whether they were accessible and, if not, whether we could do anything to make them better. We will carry out the same process this year. We ended up taking a touring ramp with us, which was simply something out of the back of a van, but it enhanced access. There are places that are not perfect, but it was still worth our while to go to small venues in all parts of Scotland. Although a lot of new-build small village halls are not ideal, they are on the flat, so people can get in.
Forgive me for saying the same thing over and over again. Access is often said to be a huge barrier, but it is less of a barrier than people think. The smallest section of people with disabilities are chair users. I accept Morven Gregor's point that there are communication challenges, which we see as barriers. People who have severe mobility difficulties constitute the smallest section of our population with a disability. People who have learning difficulties and mental health problems do not have the same access problems.
To what extent do the physical barriers still exist and what should we be doing to surmount them? The DDA was supposed to take care of the practicalities, but we obviously have a long way to go, so I would welcome suggestions about how we might do so. We have to tackle the perception that when we talk about access we mean that people have to be able to get in in a wheelchair. We have also to consider blind or deaf people or people with learning disabilities.
The DDA has clarified our responsibilities with respect to access. We seconded a member of staff who had a disability to lead the DDA audit across Edinburgh Leisure, and there is now an action plan for every venue. However, that has taken time, as some of our older venues—the old branch baths such as Warrender swim centre and Glenogle swim centre—were designed 100 years ago, so access is particularly challenging and major refurbishment is needed. Nevertheless, we have real clarity on where we are going and how we are going to get there. Access is still a problem, but a lot more emphasis is being placed on it and organisations are considering it. It will take more time and resources to ensure that all our buildings are accessible, but people are doing a lot of positive work on accessibility.
Are you talking also about visual accessibility, by which I mean readable signs and that sort of thing?
I mean everything, although I suppose those are the easiest issues to resolve. The problem is to ensure access for wheelchair users at the old baths, where there are 50 steps to get up.
Many of those issues do not get resolved. Even as an able-bodied person who has reasonable sight, I find that a lot of signage is in the wrong place—it is too high or too low—or it is too small or has a poor background or foreground.
Absolutely.
Like Edinburgh Leisure, we have audited our facilities. Our four main centres are DDA compliant, but we still have one or two outdoor sports changing facilities that require attention.
You say that only a small proportion of disabled people are in wheelchairs. We are also talking about inclusiveness. Whether access relates to transport information or being able to get out and about, we should not look at it just as a disability issue.
That is the kind of thing that we have been hearing from people.
On the definition of disabilities, it is important to recognise that we work with people who have mental health problems and who do not necessarily describe themselves as disabled. They do, however, have additional support needs. It is easy to be clever and to say that we can always find a disability that is not being catered for. However, if we design really good services from the point of view of inclusiveness and try to ensure that those services address as many needs as we know about and can cater for, that would be an incredibly useful starting point.
Frank Keddilty mentioned numbers. The Birds of Paradise Theatre Company has historically performed at a theatre at Upper Springland in Perth, which is part of a community for disabled people. Perhaps there is a question whether an inclusive organisation should perform at such a venue, but we will continue to do so because that theatre is accessible for an audience of about 40 disabled people, whereas Perth Theatre in the town centre has space only for about two wheelchairs.
A report entitled "The Ticking Time Bomb" identified sports facilities around the country that are in desperate need of investment, which exemplifies the issue that arises with the DDA. Every local authority is committed to making facilities more accessible, but there is not enough money to do everything that people want. Most local authorities allocate money for which leisure managers must bid; people must make the case that their project is better than the next person's project. We recently applied to sportscotland for money for a facility that is well used by disabled people, but our application was unsuccessful because we were competing with every local authority in Scotland. In the context of securing physical access to leisure centres, there is not enough money to go round and the money that is available could be spent 10 times over. We have talked again and again about the attitudinal barriers and we can all influence attitudes. However, we can overcome physical barriers only up to a point; money must be generated.
I endorse what Richard Brickley said. Last week, I took part in a discussion at a local leisure centre, which needs more than £3,000 to upgrade changing facilities to assist more severely physically disabled people. The centre simply does not have the money. That is an immediate barrier.
Fiona Wernham mentioned doing an internet search of charities that provide funding. Can she give us more detail about that and perhaps the list of charities itself?
We carried out the search in the past few days. We want to develop more services for people with support needs in sports such as trampolining and athletics and we are working with Lothian Disability Sport. Investment will be needed, so we carried out a basic internet search for charitable organisations that fund people who have support needs in various contexts, including sport. The search turned up the usual suspects, such as the BBC's Comic Relief, but we also found trusts that provide funding. I cannot remember names off the top of my head, but I will be more than happy to send the committee a list of the many charitable organisations that we found that make grants of between £1,000 and £25,000 for local work. We will progress the matter to try to get new programmes off the ground. Sustainability might be an issue, because such funding would be short term, but at least we might gather momentum for programmes. We managed to find quite promising opportunities for securing additional resources.
It is hard work spending one's life looking for money, as I did in a previous role—I think that Morven Gregor is going to tell us that.
I am afraid so. We are lucky in that we get some of our income from trusts, but it is hard work and there is no magic wand. I do not know how sustainable such an approach is; an organisation gives us a grant one year and says, "Well, that's you. Thank you very much and we'll see you again in a few years' time," which does not provide stability for long-term planning and the continuation of projects. I want to put in place projects that will take five to 10 years to develop. For example, it takes a while for a disabled kid to move on from Ashcraig school to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and then on to our stage. Wee pockets of money all add up, but the process is hard.
I agree with Morven Gregor. The issue will be how we deliver the programme in partnership with Capability Scotland. Capability Scotland has an inclusive leisure service model and it bases all the support that it provides to mainstream organisations such as ours on a sort of peer mentoring programme as opposed to direct provision, which means that we will step back and the young person will not have to do anything.
It might come as a surprise to Richard Brickley, but I agree with him. There is only so much money to go round. Income from trusts and foundations—from which we also benefit—is seen by the organisation as venture capital. As well as trying to define and develop a new bit of a service, we have to look at ways in which that can be made sustainable. That takes us back to Fiona Wernham's point. It is partly our own responsibility; it is not just somebody else's responsibility to fund the service. We have to examine how we can work in partnership and influence mainstream services to change. A better network sharing information about where resources can be found would be incredibly helpful. We are now very experienced in raising those types of funds, but there are many smaller voluntary organisations that are not. Where can they find that information? Where can they get help to get those small amounts of money that help their services to grow? That is sometimes overlooked.
If there is a council for voluntary service in those organisations' area, it should be able to help with that. One of the big things that people have raised with us is access to information. How does someone with a disability find out where they can get involved in theatre? How do they find out how they can participate in sport, what their local authority is doing or what organisations are involved in?
I had not thought about it until it was pointed out to us, but many visually impaired folk find the internet incredibly useful. There is a software package—I cannot remember its name—that allows folk voice-controlled access to the internet. We use the internet quite a bit. We also have a newsletter for young folk that we send out.
A number of voluntary organisations specialise in working with people from certain communities—for example, people with sensory impairment, people with learning difficulties and people with mental health problems. Rather than duplicate the services that they offer, we tend to operate through the voluntary organisations, as they can produce information in formats that are appropriate for the particular individuals, which is unbelievably costly. If we are running conferences, for example, we will have an interpreter on board. That is extremely costly, but it is the least that we can do. As a sports organisation, we cannot afford to produce regular information bulletins in accessible formats, so we have taken the tack of going through the voluntary organisations that have direct links with people with specific conditions.
Similarly, we deal with local groups. We also deal with social work for older people. There has to be a forum or venue for getting back comments such as those that you have made this morning about disabled access. We have to link with people who use the services, rather than the routine groups. We tend to deal with organisations or carers; we probably do not have enough face-to-face contact with individuals who have a disability to get genuine feedback from them. Improving communication and getting more information going back and forth would help us in trying to improve and develop the services that we provide.
We were looking to put together a disability information section of our leisure website in order to put out some material, but we were not sure about the level of detail that is required. Should we provide more integrated information, as opposed to specific disability information? How do we take that forward? We asked Capability Scotland for its advice and it gave us screeds of recommendations. We are getting there, but we have been unsure whether we should separate the information or make it more integrated and, if we make it more integrated, how easy it would be for someone to find it. We are feeling our way to get the most appropriate method of communication to make it easier for people to get information. The support of experts in the area of sports provision has been very helpful.
Most of our programmes are oversubscribed, so we want to get the information out to make the case that they are worth while. The individuals on our mailing list continually receive mailings about what is happening, but we also try to push the information out through the organisations that offer housing support and through other types of disability support organisation. There is information on our website, and we send out leaflets and take part in conferences—for example an Enable Scotland conference or a key housing conference—at which artists with disabilities offer workshops. There are several methods of getting information out. There is information in written form, but there are also demonstration projects at mental health today and learning disability today conferences and places where we always offer workshops. In those projects, we are saying, "You too could be doing this," and individuals see what is happening and can find out the information. Getting information out to people is perhaps the hardest thing to do.
We produce newsletters in Braille and on tape and so on, but it is the networking that is an incredibly important, effective and cost-effective way of getting the message out. The disabled people we work with are surrounded by a range of carers or gatekeepers; getting that information out to those individuals is therefore incredibly important. It is a very cost-effective means—for once—of getting information out to the right people.
Last year, thanks to some funding from Scottish Disability Sport through sportscotland, we managed to employ someone in the Highland active schools project, which is a programme for disability that is similar to the one in Fife. We are finalising work on the questionnaires that went out to parents, teachers, head teachers and pupils with learning needs, additional needs or physical disabilities. The idea is to build up a communications database so that information goes directly to people at home. We have found that if we send stuff for younger members to their resource centres or schools it never gets to them. We are taking a more direct approach—only time will tell how successful that will be. There are many groups out there. People are not tripping over one another, but we are crossing over. We have to try to produce a communication booklet for all the events in Highland that involve people with all types of disability, such as sensory impairment.
I hope that I am not going off-beam—
It is okay—I am about to open up the discussion.
I wanted to ask about the benefits system. We all agree that we lead by example. If we saw more disabled people becoming teachers, actors and so on, people might be more inclined to do it too. Has the benefits system provided a disincentive for any of the witnesses to employ disabled people?
Have any of your organisations been involved in employing disabled people?
I have no experience of the benefits system being a disincentive. All of us are passionate about our fields and are keen that people with disabilities should eventually become sports coaches or even just role models.
I employ disabled actors. Acting is not the most secure profession at the best of times, but folk still decide to do that job. Although the contracts are short-term ones, the fact that they tend to last between eight and 10 weeks means that it is worth somebody's while to come off benefits and take a job that is offered to them. However, the situation gets a little trickier in relation to the tutor pool that we are developing. People who are employed in that regard will be more like freelance drama workers. Their employment will be sporadic: they will do half a day here and half a day there. I am not familiar with the ins and outs of the benefits system, but one young woman told me that she did not want to take part in our tutor pool because she was worried about losing her benefits. That is a tragedy, because it is a missed opportunity. I think that she decided to remain on jobseekers allowance, but a price had to be paid for that decision, which was that she could not take up the piece of work that she was offered. Some other people are able to take up the work because of the 16-hour rule, which means that they can work for up to 16 hours a week before their benefits are affected.
This morning, we have been asking lots of questions. From your background papers, you will be aware that we are engaged in a fairly lengthy inquiry into the barriers that face disabled people in Scotland. In the next part of our discussion, I would like to ask our witnesses to tell us the issues that are faced by their organisations, how particular challenges have been overcome and, most important, what recommendations should be in our report. I would like to know what things have not come up so far that are important for the work of the organisations.
Under the DDA, there are minimum standards for access—businesses must have ramps, colour-contrasted signs and so on—but I would like to know what people think about minimum standards for service delivery. For example, the model that is used in Fife is excellent; I would love to have that in West Dunbartonshire. It would be good if every local authority in Scotland had to have an officer whose remit was to look at disability issues in leisure, arts and so on. We do not have such an officer. Although I do some work in that regard as part of my job, I have a lot of other things to do and cannot devote to it the time that it requires. Might the Executive be able to insist that local authorities have such an officer? I do not know how the matter could be progressed, but it is important that there be minimum standards for service delivery.
My breath has been taken away by the point about minimum standards for service delivery. I think that, from the point of view of our attempts to improve services for disabled people, the big issue is the allocation of specific funds for that purpose. In an environment in which pressure on finances is extreme and increasing, that is one of the major challenges that we face.
Does anyone else have any ideas about what we should include in our report? I am getting really depressed, I have to tell you.
I will finish on a positive note. The fact that the committee is having the inquiry allows us the opportunity to offer our views, to bring many important issues into the public domain, to ask questions and to set up models of good practice. The committee is to be applauded for that. In my years of involvement, this is the first occasion that such an inquiry has ever taken place. Undoubtedly, we will all learn from one another. We will learn from the arts and the arts will learn from us. Local authorities will also learn from one another. The committee is to be applauded for what it is doing.
I echo those remarks. The national programme for mental health and emotional well-being is one example of how the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive are making specific efforts to raise awareness of mental health issues. It will come as no great surprise to the committee to hear that I personally disagree with elements of that programme, but such an awareness-raising initiative and the investment stream that goes with it are a positive way of addressing issues. The Executive and the Parliament are to be congratulated on that. If we could replicate—not necessarily on the same scale—some of the networking, support and profile of that programme, that would be very helpful.
My plea is that inclusion should apply right across organisations rather than just to the little disability sector. Inclusion should not just be a box that is ticked as an add-on or supplement but something that applies day in, day out in every organisation. Perhaps inclusion issues should somehow be reflected in funding. If the big organisations monitored inclusion and based funding decisions accordingly, that might start to shake things up a wee bit.
As I understand it, inclusion should already be part of best value, but that is not happening as far as we can see. Clearly, we need to ensure that equalities are mainstreamed within organisations rather than regarded as an add-on. That is what we hope to achieve.
We need to be able to identify whether people are actually delivering inclusion. We need an holistic rather than a piecemeal approach.
Today's meeting has been valuable, as I have learned a lot from other organisations that are doing good work. Much positive work is already taking place and many organisations are being proactive. With so much more funding now going into sport and leisure, we start from a positive grounding.
That is a good point. How do we know what still needs to be done? Organisations need to talk to disabled people to check that out.
Absolutely.
People will need systems in place if they are to do that.
Yes.
Do the witnesses think that organisations should be given funding only if they have such systems in place?
I should look to my colleagues to answer that. It is reasonable for funders to require a level of expertise. There needs to be a will to do it and a knowledge of how to do it.
Do committee members have any further questions?
I have a question on Birds of Paradise Theatre Company's written submission. The final paragraph states:
At the moment, the idea is a bit of an out-there kind of notion. A colleague came up with the phrase "access to leisure". The notion is that, just as a deaf person who needs a sign language interpreter for their job can get the costs paid by the access to work initiative, similar support should be available for attending arts activities of the sort that are supported by Jan-Bert van den Berg's projects. The access to work model could be applied to provide people with entitlements to the arts. We should perhaps start with young people. I heard recently that, during school holidays, school kids can receive packages containing all sorts of goodies, such as vouchers. Perhaps that could provide a starting point for encouraging folk to engage more with the arts, sport and other activities. We need some kind of wee incentive that says to people, "Yes, this is for you—you can do this." That is as far as I have got with the idea.
That is the kind of idea that we are trying to gather in our inquiry.
Another label for that is cultural entitlements.
Yes.
It will be interesting to see how those cultural entitlements are put into practice.
Today's evidence session has been really helpful. It will encourage the committee in its scrutiny of the Scottish Executive's budget, which we always find difficult. It is important that the budget measures whether any value has been added in the promotion of equal opportunities. An important idea is that we should scrutinise funding streams. For instance, if the promotion of mental health and well-being is a Scottish Executive priority to which money has been allocated, it is important that the committee scrutinises whether that money is effective and is making a difference. That is a small thing that we need to do.
I thank all the witnesses for their input, which has been very helpful. We are trying to get as much information as possible, so we find it helpful when people share information with us. I hope that the witnesses have also found this morning's session helpful. When our report becomes available in the summer, we will ensure that people get an opportunity to look at it.
Meeting closed at 12:02.