A House of Commons committee has revealed a damning picture of wide-scale accessibility failures that it says are “systemically ingrained” across every mode and network of travel across the UK. The findings come from the cross-party Transport Committee, which has published the results of its inquiry into disabled people’s access to transport. Of course, taken in tandem with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) brutal benefits cuts, it paints an abysmal picture for chronically ill and disabled people which its new welfare reforms are angling to force back to work.
First DWP cuts, now this
Since February 2023, the House of Commons Transport Committee has been running its Accessible transport: legal obligations inquiry. This was to look into the current situation for chronically ill and disabled people accessing transport services across the UK.
Now, the results are in, and what it found is a shameful indictment on the state of transport accessibility across the full spectrum of services available.
The inquiry’s report underscored gargantuan gaps in accessibility for chronically ill and disabled passengers across a range of transport areas. Notably, the inquiry found that:
- Just under 90% (89%) of respondents said they experienced “challenges or barriers” to travel either often (22%), most of the time (31%), or always (36%). Only 2% said they never experienced difficulties.
- 68% of respondents reported difficulty often, most of the time, or always travelling as pedestrians owing to an inaccessible street environment.
- The same was true in over 60% of replies for both bus and rail travel.
In particular, respondents raised issues with infrastructure features like pavements and bus stops. For instance, the National Federation of the Blind raised difficulties with ‘floating bus stops’ and ‘bus stop bypasses’ that made it:
extremely difficult to cross these cycle lanes safely
Similarly, illustrating some of the difficulties navigating the street environment as a chronically ill and/or disabled person, the report highlighted issues with pavement parking. This typically revolved around space for wheelchairs, walking frames, guide dogs or canes.
For rail, the report highlighted how failure of passenger assistive services was an endemic problem, noting that:
The industry was habituated to regular failed assists
Of course, there was significant media attention over this in August when passenger assistance on train services in London abandoned Paralympian and wheelchair user Tanni Grey-Thompson. So, the inquiry underscored how this is a systemic and common experience for disabled passengers on trains.
Overall, while the street environment, trains, and buses were the worst forms of transport for accessibility, the report observed that:
No mode of transport is free from problems.
As a result, more than a third of respondents said they often decided not to make a journey because it would be too complicated or unsafe, more than once a week. In total, more than half said they would avoid traveling for those reasons either more than once a week, or more than once a month.
Recognise transport accessibility for the human rights issue it is
On the whole then, the report revealed a damning litany of failures in transport accessible for chronically ill and disabled passengers. As such, the committee made a series of recommendations to redress this.
Importantly, it stressed how accessibility for chronically ill and disabled people must be:
recognised as an issue of human rights and protection from discrimination, not as an optional customer service matter.
It therefore made suggestions to overhaul the inadequate accountability mechanisms that place the onus on chronically ill and disabled passengers making complaints or taking legal action to correct this. Part of this would involve implementation of a new unified and user-friendly complaints service – which it called on the government to establish within the next twelve months.
On top of this, it argued for a review of current transport accessibility legislation to:
assess how it could be streamlined, clarified and updated, and underpinned by greater specification of the standards providers must work to, including in matters currently subject only to the Public Sector Equality Duty and duty to make reasonable adjustments
Alongside that, it urged a review of regulators’ powers, as well as more resources for enforcement action.
Finally, the Transport Committee set out how it expects the Labour Party government to produce a:
new inclusive transport strategy, backed by a costed, practical plan that will close the gap between rights and reality.
DWP cuts: all about work, but it’s impossible to get there
Its findings come as the Labour Party government launches its plan for a suite of DWP cuts to chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits.
And crucially, this flagship Pathways to Work green paper is – as its name suggests – focused on forcing chronically ill and disabled claimants into the workplace. Crucially, the basis of the cuts revolves around the idea that at present rates, health-related benefits like Universal Credit’s LCWRA part “incentivise” people to stay out of employment.
Partly, this is because the DWP claims that because the basic rate is so low, people that don’t need to be out of work apply for the health-related part. Of course, the basic rate is sorely inadequate after more than a decade of cuts, freezes, and punitive sanction policies successive Tory governments have applied. However, this doesn’t equate to the health-related part being too “generous” as the government is keen to imply.
Nevertheless, the DWP is justifying cuts to this of up to 50% for new claimants, as they raise the basic rate. It means chronically ill and disabled claimants not-fit-for-work will be £146 worse off a month. The intention is that these less “generous” out-of-work benefits will push people into finding work. That might be true for some because the state-sanctioned poverty will leave them with no other choice, but it will invariably come at a cost to their health. For many others, it simply wouldn’t be possible, so will actually just result in more and deeper poverty for chronically ill and disabled claimants unable to work.
This also forms the underlying thrust of the DWP’s proposals for ‘reforming’ contributory Employment Support Allowance (ESA) as well. Moreover, even though Personal Independence Payment (PIP) isn’t an out-of-work benefit, it has conflated the rise in claims for it with unemployment.
Predictably then, it’s putting forward plans to make it harder to claim this too, by tightening the eligibility criteria for it. In reality of course, making PIP harder to claim will do the opposite of helping people into work. The benefit is there to aid chronically ill and disabled people with the additional costs of living. Without it, they’ll have less financial means for travel, assistive technology, mobility aids, and medication that actually make it possible to work.
Overall, in a nutshell, the government’s plans are geared around forcing chronically ill and disabled people to work. So, the Transport Committee’s findings obviously have enormous implications for all this.
A ‘constant negation of the fact’ chronically ill and disabled people have lives
Notably, the report detailed that the systemic inaccessibility of the different forms of transport chronically ill and disabled people use is:
a considerable barrier to going about daily life in the way that the wider population expect to be able to.
Naturally, this includes barriers to work as well. Tanni Grey-Thompson told the committee that the immense amount of planning chronically ill and disabled people have to do to travel is a:
constant negation of the fact that we have lives, we have work, we have families. We are constantly treated differently.
Meanwhile, disabled activist and wheelchair user Alan Benson also gave evidence to the committee. He calculated that across a six month period, out-of-service lifts on his normal route to work added an extra three weeks of travelling time to his journey.
Another anonymous respondent articulated the impact of the inaccessible built environment for their journey to work:
I live less than a mile away from my workplace but as a wheelchair user I need to travel on the road for most of that journey because the pavements are badly damaged, mostly from cars driving across them or parking on them, and there is a lack of dropped kerbs in several places
making it impossible to get on/off the sidewalk.
Broadly, the experiences of respondents and witnesses to the inquiry underscored that transport inaccessibility impacts whether chronically ill and disabled people can even get to work, and safely. So, just as the committee’s findings articulate all this, the DWP wants to cut benefits in a bid to force more chronically ill and disabled people into work.
That is, instead of looking at the systemic barriers they face getting and being in employment, the DWP is stripping away the support to give them no choice but to seek work – even though the dire state of transport means they can’t get there.
Access to assisted dying will be easier than access to transport
The Transport Committee’s chair Ruth Cadbury said of its findings that:
It should be a source of national embarrassment that our country’s transport services effectively treat disabled people as second class citizens, denying them access to jobs, leisure, support networks and essential services – denying them their rights.
Of course, the DWP cuts, and the Transport Committee’s scathing findings also come amid Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill is currently making its way through Parliament – presently at committee stage.
Leadbeater and the committee MPs skewed in favour of the bill have rejected multiple amendments that seek to mitigate the risks it poses to chronically ill and disabled people. And notably, they have often disingenuously claimed they have done so to ward against a “bureaucratic thicket” restricting access to assisted dying.
Moreover, Cadbury’s words should also be seen in the context of the bill as well. Notably, Cadbury has come out in support of assisted dying, and voted for Leadbeater’s bill at second reading. The Canary has separately reported on her familial and personal connections to the key lobby groups pushing for Parliament to legalise it. Until February, Cadbury had been chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) – the Choice at the End of Life APPG – connected to the lobby group and promoting assisted dying.
The merry-go round of punching down on chronically ill and disabled people
So what we have is a Labour MP and government ministers in the assisted dying bill committee working to remove ‘barriers’ to assisted dying. That is, the ‘safeguards’ generally there to protect chronically ill and disabled people – though it’s dubious they’d do so in practice anyway. At the same time, the Transport Committee has exposed how impossible it is for chronically ill and disabled people to access transport. Moreover, it showed that the Labour government is not moving fast or far enough yet to change this.
All the while, the same government is rapidly angling to cut benefits to chronically ill and disabled people. This will push them into further poverty, and prevent them from accessing the aids, services, medications, and even the basics they need. It might coerce some ‘back to work’, but it won’t be without health consequences.
But hold that thought, because the Transport Committee inquiry showed that the appalling lack of accessible transport makes it harder for them to get to their workplaces…And round the merry-go-round of punching down on chronically ill and disabled people goes.
See where this is heading yet? If you’re chronically ill and disabled, but not ‘enough’, or the ‘right kind of’ disabled according to the ableist arbiter that is the DWP, no PIP, and no UC health component for you. Go to work – but if you can’t because of the shocking state of public transport accessibility – sucks to be you.
You can’t have any social security to live, but when the DWP’s enforced poverty ensures you’re near starved to death, the state can give you that final little nudge. After all, your pain meds might be unaffordable, but if Parliament passes Leadbeater’s bill, you can pop a euthanasia pill for free.
Featured image via the Canary
