Helping the disabled

Alfred Morris

Mrs Dorothy Fisher is in her mid-fifties. She has had one leg amputated below the knee and also suffers from diabetes and arthritis. Her husband, Fred, is more severely disabled. He has muscular dystrophy and has been unable to work for over twenty years. Mr and Mrs Fisher live in a Kensington council flat. After many painful attempts to use an artificial limb, Mrs Fisher realised that she would never be able to manage one. Her arthritis made her unable to use crutches. Nor could she use a wheelchair in the flat because the doors were too narrow. As for Mr Fisher, if he fell he was unable to pick himself up and had to wait to be lifted.

The bedroom in the Fishers' flat was so cold and damp that they had to move their bed into the small living room. It was heated by a coal fire and the coal bunker was outside the front door. When coal had to be brought in, it was dragged by Mrs Fisher on her stump and good knee. For some years Guy's Hospital had been urging the local authority to help. Kensington refused either to re-house the couple or to effect the necessary adaptations to their flat. It was only when my parliamentary colleague, Bruce DouglasMann, took up the Fishers' case, citing Sections 2 (1) (e) and 3 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, that the council acted to make life bearable for this hard-pressed couple by adequately improving their accommodation.

This was but one of innumerable cases brought to my attention, after the Act became law, of serious neglect by public authority in meeting the housing needs of severely disabled people. For the most part, they were the cases of people locked away in houses and flats alike that were not built for the needs of handicapped people and served only as painful places of detention. There were also the cases of Young and homeless disabled, people living among the very elderly, and often geriatric, inhabitants of local authority welfare homes. With the new Act, there is no longer any justification for delay in tackling the housing problems of disabled people.

Not only is there clear provision for housing adaptation in Section 2(1)(e) of the Act, which calls for :

the carrying out of any works of adaptation in his [the disabled person's] home or the pro

vision of any additional facilities designed to secure his greater safety, comfort or convenience.

Section 3 places an entirely new statutory duty on local housing authorities to make special housing provision for the disabledt Nevertheless, there are still pitched, battles in some areas where local authorities prefer academic argument to action.

In these localities, voluntary societies have put much more drive into publicising the new provisions than the statutory bodies have shoWn in implementing them. As the voluntary societies' leaders constantly remind me, it is a prerequisite of success to increase public awareness of the appalling conditions in which even the mot severely handicapped people have had to exist in contemporary Britain.

Fresh ammunition has just arrived in an important book* based on papers presented at the first international seminar of the.. International Cerebral Palsy Society in 1971. Much of the book is about attempts here and in other European countries to meet the legitimate claims of disabled people to decent accommodation. In one of the papers, Mr A. H. Sutton, himself a spastic, puts in simple terms a question which neither central nor local government must ever be allowed to ignore:

. .. when will government wake up to the fact that it costs less to set up persons in private flats, to encourage them to live normal lives, to earn their own living, than it does to keep them for the duration of their lives in institutions?

The problems of long-term residential care in the UK, Denmark, Holland and Sweden, are discussed frankly and in depth by experts from the four countries. Mr Lancaster-Gaye is assistant director (services) of the Spastics Society, which has done so much since its inception to fill the gaps in state provision. In his paper on the UK he reflects the marked change toward humanising residential care over recent years. Too often in the past, even the voluntary care of severely physically handicapped people was custodial in approach. It was all too reminiscent of the *Personal Relationships, the Handicapped and the Community edited by Derek Lancaster-Gaye (Routledge and Regan Paul £1.80) subnormality hospital and of the triumph of institutional efficiency over humane standards.

Residential care is now seen as the last resort when family support or total independence are no longer available or possible.

The papers on Danish, Dutch and Swedish experience are crisply informative: first-hand reports on the collective house' in Hans Knudsens Plads, Copenhagen, the Het Dorp village settlement at Arnhem and, in my view most stimulating of all, the Folkus system in Sweden which demonstrates that even the most severely disabled people can live fairly normal lives given such technical and personal support as they may require.

These reports show that elsewhere, as in the UK, the voluntary societies have led the state in imaginative provision for the severely disabled. The book also discusses the employment problems of disabled people and the solutions found in other countries, and 'other papers deal with the personal relationships and emotional needs of disabled people. As with the rest of the book, they emphasise that what disabled people want, more than anything else, is merely to live limes as normal as possible. What hurts disabled people even more than loss of faculty is the thought that they are regarded by the able-bodied, even oftentimes treated, as if they were a separate species.

Those who want to know what it is like being disabled, and how disabled people feel, will find out by reading this book. They may even be inspired to help in transforming public attitudes to disablement, from condescension to genuine concern, and to insist on the immediate implementation of our new legislation in their localities. This would at least ensure that there are no such oppressed couples as the Fishers still preventably suffering in their midst. What all readers can hardly fail to see is that they, too, are personally involved. For potentially, are we not all disabled?