Agenda item

3.1     Roz Hardie (Director – Lewisham Disability Coalition) introduced the report. The following key points were noted:

·      Lewisham Disability Coalition provides guidance, advice and support for Lewisham residents with a disability. The bulk of its work is in providing support to people facing a perceived immediate crisis, often either financial or related to their housing situation. National changes to the employment support allowance have created a lot of work for the charity.

·      The Equality and Human Rights Commission conducted a statutory inquire in 2009 review into disability related harassment called ‘Hidden in plain sight’. In the 10 or 15 years before that report, it had been quite common that services that tackled hate crime did not include disability related hate crimes in their work.

·      The case studies featured in the report are all allegations that have been related to employees of the Lewisham Disability Coalition. People do not tend to report incidents of disability related harassment to lewisham Disability Coalition in the first instance, but if mentioned, experienced caseworkers tended to carefully enquire further. It takes experience and awareness from staff to know when to ask further while not shocking people.   

·      Lewisham Disability Coalition serves as a third party reporting site for hate crimes. The organisation had an extended period where they were without a director. This had led to a loss of information about how to properly operate as a third party reporting site. Maintaining this knowledge is the responsibility of the Lewisham Disability Coalition, but it would lead to a concern that similar problems might exist in other organisations that serve as third party reporting sites. Lewisham Disability Coalition has reported this issue to the Hate Crime working group of Lewisham’s Safer Neighbourhood Board.

·      Advisors working for the Lewisham Disability Coalition have found that people often won’t name incidents as disability related harassment or hate crime. This could come from a lack of awareness or of confidence.  

·      The Centre for Public Scrutiny’s ‘Equal to the task’ report published in 2007 could provide useful advice on how scrutiny can take account of a local authority’s equality duties. The legislation quoted in the report was somewhat out of date though, given the time that has elapsed since the report was published.

3.2     Roz Hardie, Gary Connors (Strategic Community Safety Services Manager) and Geeta Subramaniam (Head of Crime Reduction and Supporting People) answered questions from the Committee. The following key points were noted:

·      LDC was funded by the Council to provide advice services to people regarding welfare. For general advocacy services, LDC would signpost people to other organisations that provide advocacy services. LDC has had a lot of success in supporting people in fighting the conclusions of their work assessment under the new welfare system. It was likely that the recent announcement by central government about changes to the assessment criteria for the daily living component of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) would result in more people needing advice from the LDC.

·      Different people with different protected characteristics respond in different ways to incidents of hate crime and report these differently. As part of the Safer Neighbourhood Board, the Council is developing third party reporting sites. As staff in the Council and organisations change over time, this was a continuous effort.

·      Hate crimes in general, not just those committed against people with disabilities, are under reported across the country. People would often change their lifestyles to a large degree to avoid low level abuse. One person mentioned in the report had opted to avoid public transport at busy times in the afternoon where abuse from local school children was more likely.

·      It would be helpful to review the physical space in the borough to look at any barriers to general accessibility that may exist. There was no longer a disability access officer working in Lewisham Council’s planning department to review the accessibility of proposed schemes. People tended to assume that access for people with disabilities only related to people in wheelchairs.

·      Lewisham Disability Coalition is planning to set up an interface between the LDC, the Council and other major public services in the area to identify and tackle the many small things that make services less accessible to people with disabilities.

RESOLVED: that the Committee noted the report.