It was emergency planning that was vulnerable during Covid, not disabled people, inquiry is told

It was the emergency planning systems that proved to be “vulnerable” during the Covid pandemic, and not disabled people, the UK Covid inquiry has been told by two national disabled people’s organisations (DPOs).

Disability Wales and Disability Rights UK (DR UK) told the inquiry, sitting in Cardiff last week as it considered the impact of the pandemic in Wales, that the systems had relied on “chaotic improvisation” rather than the “pre-planning and practice” that was needed to ensure “collective resilience”.

They said the “dedicated machinery” needed to generate resilience in devolved and regional governments had to include disabled people as “leaders and managers” rather than them too often still being “managed and led”.

The two DPOs were delivering their joint closing statement (PDF) to the section of the inquiry examining decision-making and political governance in Wales.

They called for the Welsh government, civil servants, charities and the private sector to all develop “a far greater skill” in co-production and co-design.

In disaster management, they said, the aim of co-production and co-design “is not just to be kind, but to be smart”, which ensures that scientific advice “remains grounded in social reality”.

They called for taskforces to be set up for the UK and devolved nations – with representatives of DPOs – that would co-produce emergency risk assessments and planning for disabled people, with that work “channelled into general planning at various national, devolved and regional” levels of government.

They told the inquiry: “Human rights protection of disabled people matters in pandemics because they are the people that are disproportionately affected.”

For that reason, the UN conventions on the rights of disabled people, and on the rights of the child, must be incorporated into the laws of Wales and of the UK, they said.

Barrister Danny Friedman, from Matrix Chambers, who delivered the closing statement on behalf of Disability Wales and DR UK, said there also needed to be work to address the “truly profound” gaps in data collection and its analysis and how it is used.

He said: “We are supposed to be in the midst of an information revolution, but its possibilities have not reached yet the interests of marginalised people.”

He told the inquiry that the Welsh government had not routinely collected figures during the pandemic which would have shown how many disabled people and others with characteristics protected under the Equality Act were hospitalised and received treatment in intensive care.

And even though Wales has led the UK on the importance of the social model of disability for more than 20 years, it had still failed to gather information that would show what disabled people might need during the pandemic, Friedman said.

The two DPOs also told the inquiry that the flaws in UK devolution ensured that those people who were “on the margins” of the system – including disabled people – were “rendered vulnerable” during the pandemic.

But they also pointed out that it was in Wales – and not England or Scotland – that “close and dynamic collaborative meetings” took place between DPOs and the government, starting in early April 2020.

UK government ministers did not even discuss the pandemic’s impact on disabled people until 21 May, and they did not start their short-lived meetings with DPOs until July, they said.

The two DPOs said the problem in Wales was that it was “too small not to be taken for granted by Westminster”, which meant that it had been “informed about decisions rather than being consulted upon them on numerous occasions”.

This also meant that Wales was “limited in what it could do locally to really change its outcomes”.

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