Last night I went along to help with an event organised by and for young people as part of Local Democracy Week. Using rooms in the Town Hall, there were "table debates " on subjects ranging from bullying through to fundraising. I was one of the councillors (along with Labour's Richard McLinden) on the table debating disability awareness and disability issues.
It was a good opportunity to get a lot of views from the young people, some of whom were wheelchair users or who had other disabilities.
We talked about hidden disabilities and the reasons why disabled people appeared behind other groups in terms of realising their rights.
The young people also had some issues. Chief among these were transport problems, and in particular taxis and taxi drivers. It seems some taxi drivers either don't deal properly with wheelchair users or are just plain rude. I have to say this bears out my experience during the few months I was using a wheelchair - but I would have hoped things had moved on a bit since then.
In the case of one incident I asked the people involved to e mail me with the details so that I could pass them on to the Council's licensing staff.
No comments:
Post a Comment