LNER’s Train Managers already use payment devices with tactile buttons and markings. LNER’s café bar devices use touchscreens, and LNER is exploring how these can be made more accessible to visually impaired passengers.

In November last year, I published the Government’s Financial Inclusion Strategy which sets out a range of ambitious measures for Government and industry to improve financial inclusion for underserved groups across the UK.

This includes a focus on inclusive design and accessibility. As part of this, the Strategy recognises the work taken forward by The Royal National Institute of Blind People and UK Finance to introduce accessible, tactile, features for cards, so that those who are blind or partially sighted are better able to distinguish between card types and orientate them when using card readers. Following a commitment in the Strategy, UK Finance published a Code of Practice for Accessible Cards earlier this year, which will ensure these features are consistent across participating firms.

The Strategy also includes the launch of an industry-led inclusive design working group which will consider submissions from consumer representatives on how to make products more accessible. UK Finance are leading this initiative and plan to publish a roadmap by the end of the year setting out its priorities.

The Government is continuing to work collaboratively with industry and consumer representatives to ensure the delivery of interventions remains informed by a wide range of expertise and lived experience.

High-quality, inclusive facilities are essential to increasing participation by under-represented groups, including for visually impaired people.

The Government is also investing £400m over the next four years in new and upgraded grassroots sport facilities, promoting health, wellbeing and community cohesion, while removing the barriers to physical activity for under-represented groups, including people with disabilities.

Sport England, the Government’s arm’s-length body for grassroots sport, works to improve accessibility nationwide, including in Lincolnshire and South Holland and the Deepings. Partnering with the Royal National Institute of Blind People and British Blind Sport, it invested £1 million in the See Sport Differently initiative to remove barriers preventing blind and partially sighted people from participating in physical activity. Additionally, Sport England’s updated Accessible and Inclusive Sports Facilities design guidance provides local authorities, leisure operators, and sports clubs with practical standards to ensure facilities are fully accessible to visually impaired participants.

It is important that postal services are accessible and work effectively for all users, particularly those relying on the Articles for the Blind service. The obligation to provide this service is set out in legislation and regulations are overseen by Ofcom, as the independent regulator.

Ministers have met with both Royal Mail and Ofcom to discuss concerns about delivery performance and will continue to make representations to ensure that customers receive the service they are entitled to.

LNER’s Train Managers already use payment devices with tactile buttons and markings. LNER’s café bar devices currently use touchscreens and LNER is exploring accessibility improvements.

The Secretary of State has not made any assessment of the impact of pavement parking or e-bikes on the safety of guide dog users specifically in Surrey Heath.

Access to Work awards are made on the basis of a customer’s work-related needs, rather than their disability or health condition alone. Those needs can change over time, even where the customer’s condition has not changed. This may be because the customer’s role, workplace, working pattern or employer arrangements have changed, or because new solutions or technologies are available that can meet the customer’s needs in a different way. For this reason, support is reassessed at renewal to ensure it remains appropriate to the customer’s current work circumstances.

DWP recognises that while customers greatly value the support provided by the Access to Work scheme, they also have concerns about the scheme’s timeliness, consistency and appreciation of the complex barriers faced by people with disabilities in a modern workplace. The Department is addressing these points in order to deliver an improved scheme that will better help disabled people start and stay in work.

Efforts undertaken by the Department to achieve this include the recruitment of 480 additional staff to help reduce the Access to Work backlog by September 2027. These members of staff will receive extensive training to support them to handle complex applications. In addition, the Department is continuing to engage with a range of stakeholders to develop a richer understanding of the challenges disabled people face. The feedback from this engagement will be used to shape improvements to the scheme that better reflect the current needs of customers. Any improvements to Access to Work will be announced in advance of their implementation.

The Department for Education and Department for Health and Social Care ministers are jointly engaging stakeholders to ensure our reforms work in practice. As part of this engagement, I took part in a roundtable earlier this year to discuss visual impairment with representatives from various organisations, including the Royal National Institute of Blind People.

We want every child, including those with special educational needs and visual impairments, to have the best start in life, with help available earlier and locally when families need it. To support this, we are investing £1.8 billion over the next three years for local partnerships to develop and deliver an Experts at Hand offer, giving mainstream settings greater access to specialist education and health professionals, including specialist teachers such as qualified teachers of the visually impaired

Alongside this, we are developing the National Inclusion Standards, which will set out what ordinarily available provision should be in every setting to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. They will also include tools and approaches to identify and respond to needs through the targeted/targeted plus layers of support. Specialist Provision Packages will provide support for those children and young people with the most complex needs.

We cannot provide details of individual impairments.

Under the Transport Act 1985, so far as reasonably practicable, at least 50 per cent of DPTAC’s membership should be made up of people who identify as disabled, making sure that lived experience informs advice to the Department.

The government is committed to improving public transport services, so they are more inclusive and enable visually impaired people to travel safely, confidently and with dignity. As part of our broader mission to break down barriers to opportunity, we recognise that more needs to be done to ensure transport is accessible to all.

Our Bus Services Act 2025 includes a comprehensive package of measures to improve the accessibility and inclusivity of local transport. Through the Act, we are helping authorities to provide safer and more accessible bus stations and stops and mandating more streamlined disability training for bus drivers and frontline staff. We are also requiring local authorities to regularly review the accessibility of their bus networks through the development and publishing of a Bus Network Accessibility Plan.

The government recognises the concerns which have been raised about floating bus stops in particular. Statutory guidance on the provision and design of floating bus stops was published on 26 January 2026 and is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/floating-bus-stops-provision-and-design/floating-bus-stops-provision-and-design. All traffic authorities in England, including in London, must have regard to this guidance.

We are also continuing the implementation of the Public Service Vehicles (Accessible Information) Regulations (AIR), which will require audible and visible destination and next stop information on board most local bus services by October 2026.

Ensuring the rail network is also accessible is at the heart of our passenger-focused approach to improving rail services. We are committed to improving the experience for disabled passengers and that is why we have published a roadmap to an accessible railway. It sets out what we are doing now to improve the day-to-day travelling experience for disabled passengers in the lead up to Great British Railways being established. We have completed a programme to install platform edge tactile paving at every station in Great Britain.

We are also committed to developing an Accessible Travel Charter. The Charter is a commitment to a shared vision for accessible travel. It will set out what disabled travellers can expect from their journeys, share best practice across organisations and create consistency in end-to-end journeys for disabled travellers.

The Disability Confident scheme provides employers with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to attract, recruit, retain and develop disabled people and people with health conditions in the workplace. It is a voluntary scheme, developed in partnership with disabled people, employers, and disabled people’s representatives.

The government announced reforms in January 2026 to strengthen the scheme and support continuous improvement for employers. Proposals include speeding up progression between levels, encouraging more small and medium‑sized businesses to participate, better enabling employers to learn from one another, and making sure disabled people’s lived experience shapes how the scheme works.

There are a range of factors which can influence employment outcomes for disabled people, including for those who are blind or partially sighted.

Previous research on the Disability Confident scheme focused on employer experiences. More research is planned to evaluate the effectiveness of the reforms and this will include research with disabled employees.

To ask the Right hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, what recent assessment the Commission has made of the adequacy of polling station provision for blind and visually impaired voters.

As I have said, the commission will review what happened in the May 2026 polls and make any further recommendations it feels necessary as a result. The hon. Lady makes two important points. It is important that equipment is available, and she will know that tactile devices have been found by the commission to have been available in every polling station. Her other important point is that people who are blind or partially sighted need to know about that, and communicating that information is crucial—she is absolutely right.

I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his answer. Responses to a survey by the Royal National Institute of Blind People at the time of the last general election showed that 73% of people who are blind and visually impaired did not know that those adjustments were available at polling stations. I have tabled an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill that would require those adjustments to be made available. In the meantime, could he set out what more the commission can do ahead of the next elections to ensure that blind and visually impaired people can vote independently and in secret?

I will certainly make sure the commission hears what the hon. Gentleman has said. He will appreciate that judgments on these things are often for returning officers or for those managing individual polling stations, but he makes an important point about access. As I say, I will make sure the commission hears what he has said.