Election hustings candidates invent disability policies, days before general election

A series of election candidates have been caught inventing party policy in front of an audience of disabled people, at a disability hustings event held just days before the general election.

The event in Bristol was organised by five disabled people’s organisations* who wanted disabled people to be able to question candidates standing in various Bristol seats at next week’s election.

The Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and Reform UK sent candidates from one of the five Bristol constituencies, but Labour only offered a city councillor, Kelvin Blake.

Blake explained to the audience of voters that none of Labour’s five election candidates were able to attend because they were “obviously very busy on the stump, trying to get people’s votes”.

There was frustration and concern after the event that each of the five representatives had made statements that were not in their parties’ manifestos and were not party policy.

Blake twice stated that a Labour government would implement the right to independent living into law, telling the audience that “we’ll change the law, and enshrine independent living”, later saying Labour would “basically enshrine in law independent living”.

That is not a policy that appears in Labour’s manifesto, which only promises that, under a new National Care Service, “services will be locally delivered, with a principle of ‘home first’ that supports people to live independently for as long as possible”.

Labour has in fact dropped its previous commitment to implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) – which includes a right to independent living – into UK law.

The Conservative candidate, Rose Hulse, who is standing in Bristol North-East, said she wanted to implement the whole of the convention into UK law, a policy her party is opposed to.

She was responding to a question about a report in April from the UN committee on the rights of disabled people that found the Conservative government had made “no significant progress” in the seven years since being found guilty of “grave and systematic” violations of the convention.

But Hulse told the audience that the “UN policies… currently are not part of law. They should be part of law. They need to be written into the law.”

This is not Conservative party policy and does not appear in the Conservative manifesto.

For the Liberal Democrats, Tony Sutcliffe, who is standing in Bristol East, called for the part-nationalising of care homes, as he discussed his experience of working in a residential setting.

He told the audience: “It is absolutely vital that we try and bring all of these things back into some sort of ownership, possibly public ownership, possibly a public private ownership model.

“But it needs to be done in such a way that we can get the profit motive out of the business and actually have homes that people would live in, that they can work in, that they can have a life that is worth living.”

There is no mention of such a policy in the Liberal Democrat manifesto.

Reform UK’s Robert Clarke, who is standing in Bristol Central, told the audience that he believed disabled people should not have to “jump over hurdles” to get benefits, and that the current system was a “very Kafkaesque nightmare, and we know that the authorities and the governments love this because it means they pay out as little as possible”.

But his own party’s manifesto says that all assessments should take place face-to-face and that a Reform government would “require independent medical assessments to prove eligibility for payments” as well as saving £15 billion a year by forcing “1 million plus back to work”.

The Green candidate Jai Breitnauer, who was the best-briefed of the five panellists, still appeared to over-state her party’s manifesto promise on accessible housing.

She told the audience that her party wanted to see 150,000 new social homes a year being built.

She said: “They would be affordable homes. They would be accessible, and they’d be on good transport routes.”

But the Green manifesto does not promise that all these new homes would be accessible, pledging only that the party would “ensure that the needs of the elderly, families with children, people living with a disability or requiring support through sheltered housing are adequately catered for”.

Rick Burgess, from Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People (GMCDP), said after the event that much of the information from the panellists had not reflected the parties’ manifestos.

He said: “No-one was happy with the level of information that the candidates generally gave out.

“I don’t think any of them reflected their national manifesto fully.

“The political system let us down. If it wasn’t great, it was because of the candidates who turned up.”

GMCDP is also supporting the national disability hustings event in Manchester next week, two days before the general election.

One disabled campaigner who attended the event, but asked to remain anonymous, said: “It was not informative – candidates were allowed to make up anything they felt the audience might like, without being called out for the lack of facts or the lack of semblance to their party manifesto.

“It was not a means of holding anyone to account (which I would say is anyway an extremely naive objective for a hustings) because nobody that came has any chance of being elected.”

Alex Johnston, from West of England Centre for Inclusive Living (WECIL), who chaired the event, said he had been “hoping for more from the audience” and wished they had asked questions that were “a little bit more testing”.

He also criticised his own chairing of the event.

He said that “with hindsight I could have done better, I could have had more of a depth of understanding of each party’s manifesto” to try to “hold the candidates’ toes to the fire around policy”.

But he added: “The takeaway for me was that all of those parties could do well to read the Disabled People’s Manifesto.”

*Bristol Reclaiming Independent Living, West of England Centre for Inclusive Living, Disability Rights UK, Inclusion London and Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People

Picture: (From left to right) Tony Sutcliffe, Rose Hulse and Robert Clarke

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