Examination of Witnesses (Questions 154
- 159)
TUESDAY 9 JUNE 1998
JANE ENTICOTT,
MARGARET PEDLER
AND MR
ALUN THOMAS
Chairman: Good morning to our witnesses. As
you probably know, this is the second oral evidence session of
a short inquiry that we are doing into how to make elections more
user-friendly, and you have kindly submitted written evidence
to us, and we just want to ask you a few questions that arise
mainly from your written evidence. I am going to ask Mr Winnick
to start the ball rolling.
Mr Winnick
154. Thank you, Mr Chairman. I think I would
be right in saying we are all sympathetic on this Committee about
the difficulties that disabled people have in voting, but we want
obviously to try to get as accurate a picture as possible, and
I would ask you, first of all, if you could give a rough estimate,
and obviously it could only be a rough estimate, of the number
of disabled people who, in your view, and your colleagues', were
prevented in the last general election from voting only because
of their disability?
(Ms Enticott) Thank you. My name is Jane Enticott
and I was a co-author of the two Polls Apart reports that SCOPE
did into access to voting. We would base our figures on the 1988
Office of Population Census Survey's figures into the numbers
of disabled people in the country. Projections now state that
there must be over seven million disabled people in the United
Kingdom; that comes out as one in four households have a disabled
member. Seventy per cent of those surveyed in the OPCS were found
to have a physical disability which affected their locomotion,
their ability to get out and about; half of those seven million
people are thought to be of working age. To extrapolate these
figures, that would be roughly between 10,000 and 15,000 people
per constituency; this can only be a rough estimate, obviously,
because provision varies from area to area, and we found, in Polls
Apart 2, that 81 per cent of polling stations have one or more
access problems, therefore it is likely that substantial numbers
of disabled people in each area are affected. The failures of
the system range from lack of access, we believe, to lack of knowledge
about people's eligibility to actually vote.
155. But, can I put this to you: we know that
amongst the electorate there are people who do not vote, out of
indifference, there are all kinds of reasons why they do not vote;
would we not be right in coming to the conclusion that, certainly
amongst the disabled, and if we work on the assumption that the
disabled are like all the other sections of the community, are
hardly likely to be different except in their disability, there
must be a number who simply do not vote because they do not want
to do so, like those other people that I have been mentioning?
(Ms Enticott) I think you are probably right; we have
not investigated that in that way, although we did interview disabled
people as part of this process in 1992 and 1997, and those were
in-depth interviews with up to a hundred people, and our experience
was that they actually very much valued their right to vote and
it was very important to them, their experience generally made
them feel that voting was their duty and responsibility.
156. You will forgive me if I press this point,
but would it not be the case that disabled people, in general,
appreciate the right to vote, as indeed do the majority of people,
fortunately, the large majority of people, it sustains our democracy,
but all that I am saying to you is that it is quite likely that
amongst the disabled it is the same percentage as in the rest
of the community who, for various reasons, simply do not want
to vote?
(Ms Enticott) I would say that was really a generalisation,
I think, because it depends what area of the population you are
talking about; if you are talking, for example, about people with
learning disabilities, we know that there are significant numbers
of people with learning disabilities that do not vote, that is
because there is a perception that they are incapable, or should
not have the vote, which actually is not the case. So, without
actually doing research into the point you are making, I would
not like to generalise about that number of people.
157. And, clearly, if anyone is prevented from
voting because of their disability that is something which should
not be tolerated, and I do not think the Committee is likely to
disagree with that view. Are you satisfied that, in general, electoral
administrators on the ground are becoming more aware of the difficulties
that undoubtedly a good number of disabled people face in trying
to vote?
(Mr Thomas) Can I just answer that, to start with.
I will introduce myself. I am Alun Thomas, I am RNIB's Parliamentary
Officer. I chair RNIB's Committee on Access to Voting, I am also
the author of Within Reason: Access to Services for Blind and
Partially Sighted People, a report just published, and I also
advised Paul Burstow MP on his Elections: Visually Impaired Voters
Bill. We certainly do have evidence of improved awareness amongst
electoral administrators and also we have evidence of improved
Home Office guidance, improving the circumstances of individual
blind and partially sighted people and other disabled people wishing
to vote on the day. I am bound to say though that there is a distinction
between the guidance that is provided generally and what happens
at a local level; we still see that there are pockets of good
practice but there is quite a bit of bad practice as well. I would
also like to say, in relation to the evidence of people not voting,
we certainly find that there are a million registerable blind
and partially sighted people, two-thirds of whom are over the
age of 75, and we are aware that only around a quarter of that
population actually vote, which is substantially less, if we look
at general elections, than would be the case for voters in general.
We do think that it is very much a case of the perception of blind
and partially sighted people that voting is impossible for them,
particularly for older blind and partially sighted people, who
have difficulty in getting out or who feel frightened by the environment—overhanging
branches, uneven paving slabs, dangerous crossings and so on—and
so this is a major factor for blind and partially sighted people.
(Ms Pedler) Perhaps I can just add to that, that as
far as Mind is concerned we have not had a great deal of contact
with the electoral administrators, and I think that is probably
because the main problem that we have requires a change to the
law and so the electoral administrators think, well, there is
not really much that can be done at their level without the Home
Office involvement. But I think there is a specific disincentive
as well, because Section 10 of the Representation of the People
Act, which requires electoral registration officers to conduct
a canvass of their area to identify people who should be on the
register, does not apply to voluntary patients in mental hospitals,
so it means that that group is sort of left out of any duty on
behalf of electoral registration officers, and I think therefore
they get overlooked at that level, and that is something we would
like to see addressed.
158. Are you satisfied that political parties,
the main political parties, and indeed sitting MPs, and councillors,
are doing enough to try to make the electoral registration officials
aware of the problem; do you think there is continued pressure
from the political class?
(Ms Enticott) I would say, it varies, as in this subject
altogether, it does vary. Before the 1997 election, we did some
work with PPCs to raise awareness of the issue. Before 1992, in
the first Polls Apart survey, there was some work done but it
virtually never went to the extent of the problems. Unless people
have actually been in touch with this as an issue or seen the
reports or have awareness of the practical changes that could
be quite easily made, I very much doubt that much is being done.
159. Is that so?
(Ms Enticott) Yes. I think all our experience—we
work as a consortium, a large consortium, of disability and carers
organisations who would back up the recommendations from the Polls
Apart reports—is that provision is very, very patchy, so
areas such as Cambridge, who did badly in 1992 in our survey,
have now got an authority-wide policy to address the issue and
they leapt up to the top of the league table that we did in the
1997 survey. Certain areas such as Waltham Forest, where they
have an employee who is a disabled woman, have excellent practice
right across the board, in terms of information sheets about registration,
details of polling station accessibility, large print and minicom
facilities for people to get in touch with the office and find
out information about registration, absent voting, etc. But, as
Alun said, there is still some very, very bad practice. In 1992,
we had almost no examples of good practice given to us; in 1997,
there were substantially, obviously, more, and they tended to
be in areas that had been in touch with the campaign in some way
or had had contact with local disability groups.
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