Leaves, leaves, leaves
Madness, madness, madness: How the cumulative impact of policy changes can disproportionately impact on disabled people.
As Cilla would ask ... ... What's it all about Alfie?
Cumulative impact of
- Reduction in street sweeping
- Loss of nursing care
- Rubbish no longer collected by Haringey / Veolia
- Increased need to work and care
- Wheelchair vehicle needs an appointment at the dump
The story is ...
The reduction in the number of times our street is swept regularly leads to piles of litter and leaves blowing in off the street and into our garden. Our garden is tiny and we don't have a tree. The leaves have blown in from the heavily tree-lined street. On top of the rubbish from the street, rubbish blows in from the overflow of the rubbish bins that are next to our house from 'development' where we live.
We are the parents of a severely disabled child and we now have less free time to deal with this on going issue. The criteria for nursing care in home has changed and as a result we have lost 35 hours nursing a week. Due to various austerity inspired benefits changes, we both now have to work full time as well as sharing between us the care for our son 24/7. Two of us spent 40 minutes clearing up this mess. We don't have the free time for this.
We don't have a big enough garden nor the disposable income to justify buying into the Haringey / Veolia garden waste scheme - where your garden waste will be collected if deposited in a special bin that you have to buy from Haringey / Veolia at a cost of £55 a year. If we did that we would be paying for Harigney / Veolia to come and take away leaves from a tree that is their responsibility.
So we loaded up our wheelchair accessible vehicle (WAV), only to find out upon arrival at the dump we are not allowed access to the dump because our vehicle is a van. We would have made an appointment at the dump to dump other peoples rubbish / Haringey's leaves.
However, there is money for body-cams for the staff at the dump! Enabling them to film me persuading them that their policy is discriminatory towards wheelchair users who have to use WAVs.
The lesson to take away...
This vignette illustrates how the cumulative impact of policy changes and changes in service provision can disproportionately impact on people with disabilities. Are Haringey properly considering the cumulative impact of policy changes when they carried out their Equality Impact Assessments?
