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UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

My Lords, the Lord, Lord Ashley of Stoke, again gathers together what I have referred to, slightly flippantly, as the usual suspects. He brings forward a group of people who, under his leadership and that of the noble Lord, Lord Morris, have been snapping away at the heels of the Government for a long time. That is probably a great reminder that if you want to achieve anything in politics, you have to be not only good but persistent, first and foremost. The Government have learnt that this group is persistent. It briefs well; it gets its message out there. So when we refer to the fact that we want the convention ratified, we are talking about a group that says to the Government, ““Please continually bear us in mind, we will not go away””. The importance of that is that, as was described in the previous speech, people are not taking on board the fact that the law has been changed. The patterns of behaviour, which we must get into first and foremost, have not been changed, no matter how much legislation we have passed. The Government may well be about to say that they have done more than any other Government. Congratulations, but you should have done more. The previous Government could havesaid the same with an equal degree of truthfulness. The Government before that could probably havesaid it. We must have an ongoing process. For all the legislation that we have passed—for nearly two decades I have been helping to get some of that legislation through—we still have not got there yet. Our legal framework means that we must hit people in the courts to establish practice. That is what we have; it is not what I would want. We have to try to get inside behaviour patterns. When we come to international law and international conventions, the Government have another challenge. I thought that I had a more original point than is normally made in these debates, but the noble Lord, Lord Low, managed to steal my thunder. That shows that he has arrived running. In the EU, we should be doing more to ensure that there is more interaction with our closest political allies. In the full transfer of goods, services and labour, a disabled person should be able to transfer reasonably easily between different states. I hasten to add that equal rights do not mean special treatment. For example, if someone cannot speak French it may be difficult to work in France, but if you have a command of that language and require assistance to work there because of a disability, modern technology has the capacity to remove many of the problems, or at least make it much easier to access, and the Government should be there making sure that there is a seamless a transition as possible. This process is ongoing. The noble Lord, Lord Ashley, and his Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill have been mentioned by others. I remember discussing that Bill with my colleagues in this House and in another place. The Bill is fundamentally a personification of best practice, which we should have taken on board from the amount of time and energy we have addressed to the issue over the years. Still we do not seem to have got into the structures at both national and local government levels on what is required. MPs come up to me asking about dyslexia, which is a world I know best. ““Oh, is this how you do it? Is this what I say to my constituents? What is the guidance?”” They do not seem to realise that certain people go from it being a problem in education to a problem in the workplace. There are problems in Whitehall—those blocks that we try to punch through the whole time—but they seem to be ones where the information is not transferring quickly enough. Can the Government give me a little more encouragement that they are trying to make it easier for the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions to talk to each other? The communication of ideas between the blocks and between departments seems to have similarities. What can we do to make communication work across the spectrum? When will we get in touch with each other? It would help if the UN convention were ratified. That is basically the message; it would help us. We are not going to let the issue go; we shall come back to it again and again. Will the Government make sure that no matter how far down the chain of command, everybody knows what they are supposed to do? If a case has to be brought or a complaint has to be lodged, you have failed. At every point when you put up a barrier, no matter how small, and somebody struggles to get the rights that have been given to him by various Acts of Parliament, you have failed. No matter how many laws you have passed, you have failed at that point. The failures may not be as big as they were; they may not be as consistent; but every time you have to go through the legal process to get your rights enforced there is a degree of failure. Most of us involved would like to be able to say—we have all dreamed of this—““Job done. We can wash our hands and move on””. But it is unlikely that any of will ever be able to truly say that. There is some sympathy for the Government, as only a relative degree of success and failure is possible in the medium or long-term, but how far and how fast can we go down this road? Will the Minister say, first, how far international co-operation has gone, and secondly, what training programmes are going out from his department—I understand that not all of them are involved—to influence the actions of those who implement not only government policy but basic government services?