Neurodivergent Labour responds to the government’s National Disability Strategy:
The government’s new National Disability Strategy offers little but platitudes to neurodivergent and other disabled people. We can expect Tory government attacks on our rights and underfunding of our support to continue unabated, albeit dressed in the language of good intentions.
Key areas where we need change – including social care, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities / Additional Learning Needs, welfare benefits – are brushed away into separate plans and reviews, which promise little.
ND Labour welcomed and contributed to the call for evidence on neurodiversity in the criminal justice system at the start of this year. However, the content of this Strategy on that subject is dismal. It promises that the Ministry of Justice will work with ‘disability organisations’ to develop a neurodiversity training toolkit: not disabled people’s organisations, and not specifically neurodivergent people’s organisations. This creates the scope for the training toolkit to be designed with unrepresentative organisations with no lived experience of neurodivergence and with a patronising, deficit-based understanding of it.
The Strategy’s section on neurodiversity in the justice system focuses on ‘cultural change’, when what we need is structural change. ND Labour has listed specific changes that would make justice more accessible and less hostile to neurodivergent people, but all this Strategy offers is vague aspiration.
The Strategy promises an ‘autism awareness campaign’, seemingly unaware that the autistic people’s movement has been demanding for several years now that it is time to move beyond awareness to acceptance and action. The government will work with ‘autistic people, their families and the voluntary sector’ in designing this campaign: there is no mention of autistic people’s organisations, and the obvious danger of a small number of hand-picked autistic participants not well-placed to represent the autistic voice and drowned out by charities and others.
In its coverage of autism and intellectual impairment, the Strategy shows limited understanding of differences and commonalities between the two. It promises only mandatory training for healthcare staff (which was won by campaigning led by Oliver McGowan’s family).
The section on work promises to get a million more disabled people into work. However, there is a big difference between creating accessible, meaningful jobs with decent pay and conditions, and using benefit sanctions to force neurodivergent and other disabled people into low-paid, insecure, hyper-exploitative work. Given the Tories’ record, we can expect the latter.
Many neurodivergent people rely on support from unpaid carers. While the Strategy acknowledges the essential role of these carers, all it offers them is the possibility of a week’s leave from their paid jobs each year – which will, it seems, also be unpaid!
We welcome the Labour’s Party’s response to the Strategy, with Vicky Foxcroft MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Disabled People, commenting that, “This long overdue strategy promised bold thinking, instead we got a lacklustre effort with too much talking and not enough doing.
“The whole consultation process failed to properly consult with disabled people organisations, while many critical areas such as collecting data, adequate funding and the ongoing crisis in social care were completely ignored.“
Adding insult to injury, the Government released this crucial strategy while parliament isn’t sitting therefore avoiding any proper scrutiny. A future Labour government would produce policies in partnership with disabled people that have dignity and respect at their heart.“