All Wales People First

Challenging the candidates

We want you to…
Value employment for people with learning disabilities
Respect our right to real relationships
Ensure real social justice
Recognise and stop Disability hate crime

Front of card

Value employment for people Ensure real social justice

with learning disabilities
We need real training and real
jobs, real support from trained job
centres and job coaches. We need
employers to know we can work.
Respect our right to real
relationships, we want to have
families and children and the
support to look after them.
The police, community support
officers, courts and prisons need
to understand and work with us
Recognise and stop hate
crime because it’s something
we face everyday. It’s name
calling, shouting, bullying and
violence. You need to record
it

All Wales People First Stebonheath Centre

The National Voice of People with Learning Stebonheath Terrace
Disabilities in Wales Llanelli SA15 1NE
Telephone: 01554 784905

Back of card

mcansdale@gmail.com 07944392053
ALL WALES PEOPLE FIRST
CHALLENGING THE CANDIDATES

BRIEFING SHEET

Real relationships and family opportunities

We want to have friendships, relationships and get married. 92% of

people with learning disabilities are single and have never had a partner.

We want a chance to be parents, this means giving us information and

support to make our own decisions. Only 7% of people with learning
disabilities have children and only half of those look after their own
children.

The conventional assumption has been that the intellectual limitations of

the parent will, almost inevitably, lead to adverse outcomes for the child.
There is now good evidence that abuse is rare amongst parents with
learning difficulties, but the available evidence suggests that child
protection authorities and courts frequently presume that parenting
failure or child neglect are inevitable and irremediable

Social services presume that we can’t look after our children and they
are almost always taken away. We don’t have numbers for this because
no one has ever counted.

We have little or no support to look after children

Human Rights Act

Article 12 Right to marry

Men and women of marriageable age [16] have the right to marry and
to found a family, according to the national laws governing the exercise
of this right.

mcansdale@gmail.com 07944392053
Value employment for people with
learning disabilities

We need to be able to have real jobs, with real

pay. This means Job Centre+ staff need to be
trained better. It means that we need good
supported employment and good training. Day
centres aren’t good enough any more, doing
work experience for years isn’t helping any more.

It’s difficult to obtain reliable numbers of people with learning disabilities

in paid work. Published figures range from 11% (‘Valuing People – the
Story So Far’, Greig, 2005) to 17% (the national survey of people with
learning disabilities, Emerson et al., 2005). Whatever the exact figure,
the fact is that very few people with learning disabilities have a job
compared to those who want to work.

The new Employment Support Allowance means more people with low
support needs will be expected to work and we need good support to
make sure this is successful.

IN England there is Valuing Employment Now: real jobs for people with
learning disabilities. This sets real targets that have to be achieved.

North Lanarkshire have shown that a little investment and forward

thinking really work They have found people with learning disabilities
paid employment of 16 hours per week or more, with over 88.9% being
found jobs of this type and moving on from day centres.

The current employment rate for disabled people as a whole is 48%,

closing this gap in today’s terms would mean 48% of people with
moderate and severe learning disabilities in real jobs – or, in England,
around 45,000 more people with moderate and severe learning
disabilities in employment than we believe is currently the case. This
should be a goal across the whole of the UK.

The public sector like local authorities ands the NHS should set an
example and set aside some of their jobs for people with learning
disabilities.

mcansdale@gmail.com 07944392053
Social justice

We aren’t taken seriously by the police and

criminal justice system.
A lot of people with learning disabilities go
to prison and don’t get any support or help,
in side or to give them the skills to move on
afterwards.

You need to train the police, courts, prisons, and community support
officers to understand disability and give us the right support

20 – 30% of offenders have learning disabilities or difficulties that

interfere with their ability to cope within the criminal justice system.

Although most prisoners said they received help in court, over a fifth
said they didn’t understand what was going on or what was happening
to them.

Almost half said they had been bullied while in prison.

Recognise and stop hate disability crime

In our everyday lives we face prejudice, bullying and

ignorance. This stops us getting jobs, going to the pub
and making friends. It also leads to hate crime.

Almost everyone with a learning disability can tell you

about being shouted at, name calling, being attacked and
bullied.

People plan their lives to avoid school buses because we

will be shouted at.

We don’t report it because it happens too often and because no one

does anything.

mcansdale@gmail.com 07944392053
 Disability hate crime
South Wales Gwent Dyfed Powys North Wales TOTAL
Police Police Police Police
2008 No data. No 4 9 13
data
2009 99 56 3 8 166

When things get so bad we report it, it isn’t recorded as a disability hate
crime. The reported figures are far, far too low. We know it happens to
us every day and the police have only recorded 166 crimes in a year.

The news recently has too many stories of people being killed because
they have a learning disability.

Disability hate crime has to stop.

mcansdale@gmail.com 07944392053
Where We Got Our Information and Further Reading

Real relationships and family opportunities

Emerson, E; Malam, S; Davies, I; Spencer, K. (2005) Adults with

Learning Difficulties in England 2003/04 Health and Social Care
Information Centre

Working Together with Parents Network (2008) Facts and figures about
parents with learning disabilities in England

Tarleton, B., Ward, L. and Howarth, J. (2006) Finding the Right Support?
London: The Baring Foundation

Guide to the Human Rights Act (Easy Read Version) Published by the
Ministry of Justice March 2008

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/8344410.stm

Value employment for people with learning disabilities

Emerson, E; Malam, S; Davies, I; Spencer, K. (2005) Adults with

Learning Difficulties in England 2003/04 Health and Social Care
Information Centre

Greig, R. (2005) ‘Valuing People’ – the story so far Bristol: Valuing

People Support Team

Dept of Health (2009) Valuing Employment Now: real jobs for people
with learning disabilities.

Beyer S (2008) An evaluation of the outcomes of supported employment

in North Lanarkshire 2007

Social Justice

Prison reform Trust (2009) No One Knows: OFFENDERS WITH

LEARNING DISABILITIES AND DIFFICULTIES Wales Briefing paper

http://www.disabilitynow.org.uk/the-hate-crime-dossier

mcansdale@gmail.com 07944392053