Doug Paulley's blog

disability, data protection, activism and other such

Wheelchair spaces at the Supreme Court hearing

Posted on by Doug Paulley

There’s a lot of interest in the court case being heard in the Supreme Court next Wednesday, 15th June 2016 – FirstGroup Plc (Respondent) v Paulley (Appellant), on “the reasonable adjustments which a bus company is required to make to accommodate disabled wheelchair users.” The number of wheelchair users supporting this case is humbling. It creates practical problems for the Court due to the number of wheelchair users who would very much like to be there.

The Court have been exceptionally helpful in working out how many wheelchair users they can accommodate. They’ve removed benches to make as many wheelchair spaces as possible, so the limiting factor is how many people they can evacuated in an emergency via their two lifts. They can take 14 wheelchair users: 8 in the court room and 6 in another room with live video link. (This is more than in any other court that I’m aware of, and for that matter most other public buildings.)

The Court have worked with the legal team to work out the least unfair way of allocating these limited spaces. (We’re in a classical dilemma: we have to attempt to choose the least worst “solution” as no solution is acceptable. There will always be more wheelchair users wanting to attend than can actually be accommodated.)

I’d like to sit in the court room if possible 🙂 so that leaves another seven wheelchair spaces in the courtroom. The legal team and I wanted to make sure that wheelchair users who have had a particular, personal impact through supporting our case and/or me (through its very long 4½ years history!) can be present, so after much agonising and soul-searching we have decided to allocate those seven spaces to specific, named people.

I very much don’t want to give the impression that we are selecting “the great and the good” or in any way dissing disabled people’s amazing support for the case (and for me). It has overwhelmed me, and moved me to tears, that so many disabled people have shown such incredible support for this case. We’re not intending on creating a “hierarchy” or saying that some are more important than others; it’s not our intention at all. This is just a practical measure, partly for my support on the day (I shall be extremely nervous!), and to deal with the fact that there are limited wheelchair spaces. So I very much hope wheelchair users wanting to attend aren’t too upset or disappointed that these spaces are reserved.

There remain the other six spaces in the separate room with a live video link. In an unprecedented move (after discussion with my legal team), the Supreme Court have decided to run a ballot. This is partly at my suggestion, as otherwise there would be a “first come first served” approach, where the first six wheelchair users in the queue would be allocated the spaces. I didn’t think that would be fair, as many disabled people are limited by realities of care provision and accessible transport as to how early they can get to the court. Also I don’t want disabled people to have to wait outside in whatever weather at horrendous o’clock in the morning (particularly as there would still be a chance that they still wouldn’t get in.)

Details of the ballot are on the Supreme Court website. People wishing to attend should email or phone the Court to give their name and contact details, by 5pm on Monday (13th June 2016). Then at 5pm on Monday, the Court will draw names out of a hat and will contact those that have been successful. Wheelchair users who have not been contacted will not be able to sit in the Court.

The phone number to register is 020 7960 1500 (or as people using text relay will know, 18001 020 7960 1500 for minicom / NGT users) and the email address is enquiries@supremecourt.uk. Please tell them that you wish to register your name for the ballot for the Firstbus case wheelchair spaces.

Those not able to attend in person will be able to watch and listen to the Court proceedings live on the Supreme Court website. The video footage will also be available to watch on their website from Thursday, 16th June.

Access details

The Supreme Court website has some access details, but I visited the Supreme Court myself on Tuesday to have a recce.

The hearing is in the biggest court room, Room 1. I understand that it can accommodate 80 non-wheelchair users, on top of the 8 wheelchair spaces. The wheelchair spaces are at the back (except for me, as I will sit with “my” lawyers at the front.) I tested the loop system with the staff; it is a very good loop system. It is a little quieter right at the back (which is obviously not great for wheelchair users with hearing impairments). I raised this with the staff, and they are attempting to move the equipment so that the back has better coverage. The lighting in the room is good.

The alternative room with the live video feed has moveable chairs, so you can rearrange them if necessary. When I was there the television didn’t have an audio loop on it; but the staff are working on putting one in before the hearing. As far as we are aware, there will not be BSL interpretation or live speech to text reporting.

There is level access at the front door, but then a wheelchair lift or a short flight of stairs. Visitors will be searched before being allowed into the building. Both the Courtroom and the alternative room are accessible by lift. There are two lifts (one operable by anybody, the other only by staff with the relevant key card.) Each lift can accommodate one wheelchair user at a time, plus perhaps two or three non-wheelchair users.

There are three wheelchair-accessible toilets. These seem to be Part M compatible. The space next to the pan is clear and the emergency red cords hang down to the floor. They are on the ground floor, the second floor (where our courtroom is) and the lower ground floor (where the cafe is.) There are also regular toilets on the second floor and the lower ground floor. There isn’t a Changing Places toilet and there is no hoist.

There is a café which serves limited snacks and hot and cold drinks, and souvenirs etc. This has moveable seating and good lighting.

NB: the above are my amateur observations and I am not an access surveyor. For more detailed information, I recommend you contact the Supreme Court.

I’m very excited! and hope all goes well.

The Consistency of Wetherspoons Portion Sizes

Posted on by Doug Paulley

Back in July 2014, whilst on a day trip to Whitby, I ate at the Angel Wetherspoons’ pub. I sent this tweet.

Wetherspoons responded by pulling the CCTV of our meal and interviewing the waitress. They indicated that the portion size was within one standard deviation of the mean of their standard so they were content with the size of the portion. They accounted for my disapproval with the observation that I had been eating for precisely 2 minutes and 17 seconds when I took the photo, and stated that the waitress had testified that I had not indicated any displeasure to her at the time of the meal.

I was impressed with this commitment to customer satisfaction, so when I attended The Corryvreckan (Wetherspoons’ pub in Oban) whilst on holiday last week, I decided to support their analysis with the provision of data from another sample. This is therefore a comparative study of the size of Wetherspoons’ Steak and Kidney pudding meal.

meal diameter The diameter of the meal is approximately 18cm, on a patterned plate of approximately 25cm. The surface area of a plate of diameter d is approximately (Ï€d2)/4, or in this case 490cm2. Of that, approximately 250cm2 was obscured by food or by the gravy pot, that being an occlusion of approximately 51% of the plate. This appears to be roughly equivalent to that of Whitby in 2014; though I note that the practice of providing a gravy boat may give the impression of more food than previously.
 The chips appear to be distributed on the plate in a pseudo-random distribution. The average depth of food on the plate is therefore difficult to estimate, but is perhaps a mean of 1 or 2 centimetres from the deepest point.  chup thickness
 pie diameter 2  The pudding varies in diameter between 7cm at its “base” (the top in this picture) to 10cm at its “top” (the bottom in this picture.) The pudding is approximately 6cm in height. Using the reasonable approximation of a cylinder of diameter 8.5cm, its volume can therefore be approximated using the formula volume=(Ï€d2h)/4=340cm3. The density of cooked ground beef is approximately 1.03gcm-3, essentially indistinguishable from the density of distilled water at standard temperature and pressure (1gcm-3), so I estimate the mass of the pudding is approximately 340g. Comparative research of other single portion steak and kidney pies reveals that this is within an order of magnitude of expectation.
 pie height  pie diameter
 There were precisely 30 chips, varying in length between 2cm and 12cm, with a median length of perhaps 8cm. There was therefore approximately 2.4m of chip on the plate.  chip length
 chip thickness  The average thickness of each chip was 0.64mm. Given the presence of some outliers with tapered ends, I am estimating the total volume of the chips on the plate as being 240cm x 0.6cm x 0.6cm or 86.4cm3. Fried potatoes have a density of 449Kg/m3, or approximately 0.5gcm-3, so I estimate the total mass of chips to be approximately 43g.

Research indicates that the average portion of cooked chips is 200g, and that a few chips either way can make large cost differences. I frankly suspect some scrimping here.
 There were 169 peas. They averaged 0.45cm in diameter. The volume of a sphere of diameter d is (Ï€d3)/6, so each pea measured approximately 0.047cm3. The total peaage was therefore approximately 8cm3.

The NHS states that the “five a day” portions of veg can include “three heaped tablespoons of cooked vegetables”. A heaped tablespoon is 30cm3. This is therefore about a third of a portion of peas on that plate.

The density of cooked peas is 0.68gcm-3. The mass of peas was therefore approximately 5.5g.

  peas
 pie level  The gravy boat is a new addition since 2014. The depth of the gravy is approximately 3.5cm.

The average individual portion of gravy is approximately 50cm3.  For the gravy boat to hold that amount, it would have to have a surface area of perhaps 14cm2. I estimate that the surface area of this gravy portion exceeds this and therefore we are on the up.

But not all the gravy got eaten, as I was not furnished with a spoon.
 The total mass of the pudding, the peas and the chips was therefore approximately 390g.

The average eating rate varies substantially by individual, food type and circumstances but is approximately 100g per minute. This meal would therefore take the average person approximately 4 minutes to eat.

Of course, because I was being sarcastic and pissing about with a camera and a ruler, it took me substantially longer.

  tally
  drinkheight  My blackcurrant and soda was approximately 11cm in height and the glass was approximately 5.5cm in diameter. Its volume = (Ï€d2h)/4 = 260ml, or just less than half an imperial pint.
 But, of course, some of that was taken up by ice cubes. There were 5, with an average size of 1.5cm. The total volume of ice was therefore 5 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 = approximately 17ml.

In approximately half of cases, restaurant ice has over 1,000 colliform bacteria per cube (i.e. faecal bacteria) and is thus more contaminated than toilet water.

On average, there was therefore probably 2,500 poo-based bacteria in the ice cubes in that glass.

  ice cube size
 receipt length  The receipt varied from 19cm in length to 20.5cm, at a width of 8cm. The total surface area of the receipt was therefore 164cm2. At an assumed weight of 58gm-2, the paper weighed approximately 9mg – or approximately a billionth of the mass of this European oak tree.

Conclusion

I hope that this comparative study of the dimensional composition of my meal is to the exacting standards of Wetherspoons and contributes to their body of statistical analysis of their meal – and I look forward to their prompt analysis as to whether their Oban staff complied with Wetherspoons’ evil corporate penny-pinching control-freak bollocks.

Leonard Cheshire’s bonfire of user empowerment

Posted on by Doug Paulley

Governance failures

charities02-opinionI’ve already noted all is not well at Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD): the Chief Executive and the Head of HR left at no notice. (LCD’s PR team told a Third Sector magazine journalist that Pelham would stay on until replaced, but now LCD refute having said any such thing.) Now the Interim Chief Executive has announced that she’s leaving LCD too as soon as LCD appoints a new CEO (anticipated in September / October.)

We now know why this is happening: LCD have a £750,000 hole in their budget for the year. (They primarily blame the National “Living” Wage for this; though we know that they did precious little to prepare for the increased wage bill – and what they did claim to do was proven to be a lie.) The new Chair of the Trustees has conducted exit interviews of senior staff, whom have been very forthright about Clare Pelham. It is widely acknowledged that Clare was only motivated by the wish to become “Lady Pelham”. LCD have lost industry confidence due to pervasive doubts about their governance – a large consultancy decided not to bid for a contract valued at £200,000 per year due to their significant concerns about LCD’s management competence.

The senior directors aren’t any loss; but the other staff LCD’s making redundant most definitely are – both in the homes they are closing and elsewhere.

In earlier years, LCD had a reasonably successful “Service User Support Team” (SUST). These disabled employees worked as facilitators and mentors throughout the UK, tasked with empowering service users to achieve greater independence. This had some moderate success. As one (charming) resident in a LCD care home put it:

Every time I see a cabbage it reminds me that I could still have been in the cabbage patch myself, if I hadn’t been persuaded that there was a life for me outside.

Leonard Cheshire obviously couldn’t let a moderately successful user empowerment project stay unmolested, so they attempted to shut it down. There was an outcry, so in the end LCD just got rid of most of the employees, leaving a vestigial staff of 14 isolated disabled people dotted round the country, in the renamed “Customer Support Team” (CST). Each part-time staff member was charged with single-handedly empowering hundreds of care home residents and domiciliary care service users across their (massive) patch. Despite being manifestly overstretched and under resourced, they made a genuine difference to disabled people’s lives, because these workers genuinely cared about the rights of Leonard Cheshire’s service users.

Disabled user empowerment workers made redundant

"And when we want your opinion, we'll tell you what it is!" - "Federation of Charities for the Disabled"Leonard Cheshire are annihilating them. LCD has cut the Customer Support Team budget from £450,000 to £0,000 overnight. LCD is starting a sham “consultation” on 9th May (a bit like their sham “consultation” on the closure of Honresfeld home) but as there is no money, it is pretty clear that LCD will make all CST staff redundant. (Some have already announced their redundancy.)

The reason LCD gave for this budget cut is that its trustees took so long to consider the team’s future (over 5 months) that its budget for 2016/17 was still undecided come April 1st. That would be bad enough if it was genuine; however I note that £450,000 p.a. is a significant saving towards the £750,000 deficit, and I suspect this is the real reason. Meanwhile the “consultation” can’t start until 9th May because Mark Elliott (Leonard Cheshire’s non-disabled Director of Development) is on a multi-week holiday in South Africa. (Good of him to check everything was A-OK with his team before swanning off [not] – perhaps he should bugger off permanently like Clare Pelham [CEO] and Vicki Hemming [HR director.])

Leonard Cheshire hasn’t told its own service users about this. Senior staff are discouraging the CST from telling us, which puts the employees in an invidious position – do they risk their references by telling service users their empowerment service is being given the boot? The CST’s dedicated team of disabled people already have to cope with being told at three weeks notice that there’s no budget for their wages, forcing them to seek employment elsewhere with great urgency (and we know disabled people experience many barriers when seeking employment, even at the best of times.) In the meantime, LCD are refusing to answer any questions about the situation (from anybody, including from the CST) until the “consultation” process starts.

The Customer Action Network, a user-led organisation attempting to provide representation of LCD service users despite continual interference and undermining by LCD, wants to start a petition to save the CST – but is being asked to delay this until the CST are under formal review. I’m glad to say the Network sent it out anyway – the petition is here.

That’s how LCD are treating the dedicated, hard-working and caring disabled people who (until now) did their best to empower LCD service users despite inadequate resources and lack of support. (i.e. those whom actually attempted the user empowerment for which LCD claims credit.)

Where their priorities really lie…

LCD have four directors who each earn between £100,000 and £150,000 per year, between them earning the equivalent of the Customer Support Team’s  entire budget. The Customer Support Team are the only posts in the charity ring-fenced for disabled people. They’re the only posts specifically aimed at empowering service users.

I think LCD’s treatment of the CST and of Honresfeld residents and staff proves that LCD’s claim to be focussed on disabled people’s rights is as hollow as so many people have said for years.

(With thanks to the excellent Crippen / Dave Lupton Cartoons for both cartoons on this page, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.)