Covid inquiry hears of ‘huge rollback’ in rights and support since pandemic

Disabled people have undergone a “huge rollback” in their rights and social security support since the pandemic, a disability rights campaigner and adviser has told the Covid inquiry.

Despite politicians promising they would be “building back better”, Joanne Sansome told the inquiry that this had not happened for disabled people.

She said she believed there had been a “huge rollback with our rights and the benefits and the welfare reforms”, so politicians were not “living up to that statement”.

Sansome (pictured), who lives in supported housing in south Belfast and relies on personal care provided by care workers, said the “building back better” phrase had “rolled off their tongue every day during the pandemic”, even though there had since been “no evidence of it”.

Asked for the most important point she wanted to get across to the inquiry, she said the pandemic had shown that “co-production and deliberative democracy” – in which political decisions are made through discussion and debate among citizens – were “key to living up to that slogan of ‘building back better’”.

She said: “I think legislators have to get past the fear of it and embrace it… it’s an opportunity for everyone to be involved in the legislation that’s going to shape society and their daily lives.

“It’s an opportunity for everyone to have a voice, and everyone to be heard, and ensure that ‘nothing about us without us’ becomes reality in all legislation.”

Sansome, speaking on behalf of the Northern Ireland disabled people’s organisation Disability Action, is one of the few disabled people to have given direct oral evidence to an inquiry session about their pandemic experiences.

She was giving evidence as part of module six of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, which is examining the impact of the pandemic on the adult social care sector across the UK.

Because she was told she was “clinically extremely vulnerable” to the virus, she had to obey strict lockdown rules for more than 700 days during the pandemic.

She said the pandemic and its restrictions “had a lot of impact at the very beginning, especially, because staff were getting sick and because there was a shortage of PPE [personal protective equipment]”.

She said it had been “so scary” because people were being told to keep “social distance” and yet many of her support needs required “very close contact… so whenever they had no PPE or they were wearing cloth PPE, that you were being told wasn’t effective… that was really frightening”.

She described how her ties with Queen’s University Belfast allowed her to source PPE when there was a shortage at the beginning of the pandemic.

But she said staff shortages meant that, on one day, there were just two members of staff on duty to support 22 disabled residents.

She told the inquiry: “At that time I just kept thinking about my friends in other situations that lived in their own homes but needed care, and they weren’t getting any care.

“I know some people that were stuck in bed for days at the beginning because of the shortages.”

Sansome said that during the pandemic the internet had “brought the disability community very much closer together, as a global community, fighting for equality and rights that we had tried before but never succeeded”.

But she told the inquiry that this had fallen away “more than a little bit, since the world has got back to so-called normal”.

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