Two moves are afoot that we find very interesting especially as we seem to have been asking for action for many years.
The first is, Birmingham Children’s Hospital has installed a virtual tour on their website to reassure autistic children and tell them what to expect before they arrive.
We think this is applicable to all disabilities and that’s why we’re trying to get every public building to adopt The Blue Badge Style Gallery. We’ve developed the Quick, Full and Virtual Galleries to meet every need. See our latest press release on the subject and please spread the word in every pub, club, restaurant, bar, theatre etc. etc.
The Second is the Select Committee Report from the House of Lords on The Equality Act and Disability, published in March 2016.
It looked at the Equality Act 2010 with regard to disability and found that it was lacking!? The area that we’ve been talking about for some time is the lack of disabled facilities in hospitality venues and this report agrees with us.
In fact they recommend that restaurants with no disabled access, should be closed and local authorities “refuse to grant or renew these premises’ licences until they make the necessary changes” and install the most basic of requirements, a disabled toilet. Just as we say in our All 4 One, One 4 All campaign.
Big Hospitality magazine identified why both the issue of providing information (through a Virtual Gallery) and improving facilities are important in economic terms. They estimate that ‘pubs, hotels and restaurants lose an estimated £1.8bn a month by ignoring the needs of disabled customers’ and ’40 per cent of restaurants do not have an accessible toilet.’. Additionally only ’15 per cent of restaurants and shops had hearing loops, and three quarters of restaurants did not cater for people with visual impairments’. The Business Disability Forum also found that 3.6m people walked out of pubs, clubs and restaurants because staff were unable to meet their needs. I guess we’ve all done that at one time or another.
We’re very encouraged by this and will wait and see what happens??!! Let us know what you think or if you have examples where disabled facilities are missing and need to be installed, we can tell Justin Tomlinson, Under Sec. of State for Disabled People. Let’s give them plenty of ammunition to fight this ubiquitous of inequalities.