Letter from Andrew Dismore MP, Chair,
Joint Committee on Human Rights
I am writing in response to your call for evidence.
I focus here on ways in which Parliament could better engage with
people with learning disabilities.
Last session, the Joint Committee on Human Rights
carried out an inquiry into the human rights of adults with learning
disabilities. We recommended that public bodies should provide
accessible information for people with learning disabilities as
a matter of course.
I appreciate that there have been significant
moves in Parliament to improve access to those people who have
disabilities which affect mobility, and I welcome the fact that
the Parliamentary Outreach team has made contacts with organisations
who work with people with learning disabilities.
However, it became clear during our inquiry
that there was not a Parliament-wide strategy for improving access
for people with learning disabilities both to Parliament and to
parliamentary information. Particular issues that arose were whether
palantypists and British Sign Language translators could be made
available at Committee public meetings, and whether and how people
could access parliamentary information in formats such as Braille,
audio, British Sign Language and Easy Read.
In our report, we welcomed principles from the
Office for Disability Issues for producing better information
for disabled people. I copy these principles below, as they might
assist your Committee if you were to consider this issue further.
(i) ensure that disabled people are involved
from the start;
(ii) provide information through a range of channels
and formats;
(iii) ensure your information meets users' needs;
(iv) clearly signpost other services; and
(v) always define responsibility for information
provision.
We took steps to make our inquiry and report
accessible to people with learning disabilities. These included:
— publishing our call for evidence
in Easy Read;
— taking advice from the British Institute
for Learning Disabilities about how to make our oral evidence
sessions more accessible; and
— publishing an Easy Read summary of
our report, plus an audio version of that summary.
I enclose a copy of our Easy Read summary,
as well as the section of our report which focused on access to
information (submitted but not printed). I hope that this will
assist your Committee in considering ways that Parliament can
better engage with the public.
21 May 2009
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