Now I know why there aren’t more disabled councillors
24% of the UK population has a disability – 11% of children, 23% of working age adults and 45% of pensioners [1].
In contrast, just 10% of local councillors have a disability or long term impairment [2].
This is my first election running as a disabled person (if you don’t already know my story, I wrote about it in this letter to local Labour party members last year [3]) – and the differences compared to running as a non-disabled person are huge. In all honesty, I don’t think I would have been able to take part in this election if I weren’t already a councillor.
Here’s why:
The government will (sometimes) provide support for disabled councillors to help attend meetings, do casework, etc – but there is no assistance for candidates to allow disabled people to run effective campaigns.
Councils are not geared up for addressing the needs of disabled councillors or doing so quickly.
Elections are exhausting. If you’re standing in a marginal ward like Ouseburn, the pre-election period is a non-stop barrage of leaflet-writing, door-knocking, late nights, early mornings and not enough sleep. If your disability means you suffer from fatigue, or (like me) you need sighted assistance for nearly every task, it can sometimes be too much.
Opposing candidates can (as I think some have in this election) subtly use your disability to suggest you’re not up to the job.
Some of this is inevitable – close elections will always involve long hours and hard work. A 2021 government report [4] described the barriers experienced by disabled candidates throughout the recruitment and representation processes. So unless we do more to level the playing field where we can, our local councils will continue to be unrepresentative of the wider population in relation to disability. There can and should be more support for disabled candidates. More empathy would be nice too!
Support for disabled candidates and councillors
The proportion of local councillors with a disability has always been low, and may even be trending down. The Local Government Association estimated that 14% of councillors had a disability in 2014, but in 2020 only 10%. Many disabled people are heavily reliant on support provided by local councils, and fair representation is vital to ensure those making decisions can have collective insight and empathy.
Practical support for candidates
Until March 2020, the government provided funding schemes to meet the costs of reasonable adjustments for disabled election candidates, but despite calls from disability rights organisations to reinstate or replace them [5], there is currently nothing.
For disabled people in work, the government runs a scheme called Access To Work [6]. This makes grants to pay for practical support for disabled staff that employers may not be able to meet on their own.
In my part-time day job improving the treatment of people in debt, that means employing a support worker who can read documents for me, help me write emails and reports and accompany me to physical and virtual meetings. It means paying for software to help me do some of those things myself using “assistive technology” that will read documents out loud and type what I say.
As a councillor, I qualify for the Access to Work scheme – that’s how I manage to get through the huge casework load that forms a big part of a councillors’ day-to-day role. I couldn’t do that without my Access To Work support worker. Nor could I get around to visit residents to talk about their housing needs, or walk round the ward looking at bin problems and graffiti.
But this support is only for my role as a councillor, not for running my election campaign. For knocking on doors, writing and distributing leaflets and these blog posts, I’m reliant on volunteers, like my husband Geof.
This is what the now-defunct “Access Elected Office” and “EnAble” schemes were for. Like Access to Work does for employment, access funding for election candidates would provide vital support to allow them to campaign on a somewhat more level playing field with non-disabled candidates.
Of course, it’s still always going to be more challenging for people with disabilities to run for election – but it shouldn’t be so difficult that we end up with less than half the number of disabled councillors we ought to have.
Practical support for elected councillors
And… even if you manage to get elected, my experience is that it takes longer than it should to put support in place so you can carry out the role properly. Getting the right IT setup, navigating the steps and corridors in the Civic Centre, accessing practical support to make sure you can get to and hear from residents takes a long time – of course our needs are all different, but there are some basics that should be on tap. One simple example – papers for meetings often include tables and other formatted text as images, so screen readers are unable to read them. It shouldn’t be the job of sight-impaired councillors to help councils do this kind of thing right.
Fair treatment by other candidates
I don’t expect to get special treatment or a free-ride from other candidates in this election. Elections are always bruising affairs, and it’s perfectly acceptable to criticise opponents for making decisions we disagree with, or for behaving in ways we think are wrong.
I’ve always disliked negative campaigning in politics. You won’t find attacks on ward councillors from other parties in Labour Ouseburn Voice newsletters – I think that highly partisan politics is damaging trust in politicians of all parties, and I don’t want to contribute to that trend. I think there should be room, most of the time, for kindness in politics.
The Liberal Democrats in Newcastle have always taken a different stance, and as the opposition party within the council, it’s understandable that their publicity tends to carry critical messages about council policies. I have no complaint about that.
But it has been quite upsetting in this election to read statements in Lib Dem newsletters implying that I do nothing for Ouseburn’s residents and I just want to “warm a seat in the Civic” [7]. Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive – I know that “working hard all year round” is a standard Lib Dem slogan, but this feels different and personal. Their choice of words may not be malicious, but at the very least it suggests a lack of empathy and consideration for how it might reinforce widely held misconceptions about what disabled people can and can’t do.
My husband, Geof, was so upset that he wrote personally to the Lib Dem candidate in March [8] to ask her, very politely I thought, to reflect on her campaign messages and think about how they might feed into those misconceptions. He didn’t get a reply.
Surely we – all of us, government, political parties, individuals - can do better than this?