Firstgroup made a submission. Their submission (webpage) consists of a couple of pages of positive info about their commitment to accessibility through training, vehicles and so on. The second half consists of commentary on the recent judgments in Paulley and in Black. This is interesting in that the call for evidence said:
You should be careful not to comment on individual cases currently before a court of law, or matters in respect of which court proceedings are imminent.
I’m sad that The Fleur Perry‘s submission to the Commission was eaten by the sock monster gremlins as it seems not to have made it to the Committee. She had many cogent things to say, as demonstrated by her recent blogs on Trailblazers and in the Huff – Fleur’s other blogs at the Huff are well worth reading.
If I count correctly there were 150 written submissions to the Committee, by organisations and people. I already know that the ones by Inclusion London, Gwynneth Pedler, Transport for All and Unity Law are well worth reading; and I’m excited to note submissions by many ULOs (e.g. DEX and Manchester Disabled Peoples Access Group) as well as other important and influential groups and people (e.g. the Bar Council and Louise Whitfield.) I have less confidence that the big disability charities will have written much cogent or useful, but still, plenty of reading material for me for the next few weeks!
Even in these dark, dark times of denigration and defamation of disabled people, of death and suffering and withdrawal of support and facilities, there are still signs of hope. I recently had the pleasure of meeting with some stalwart disabled people, both online and in person; I feel like I am in the company of giants. Long may it continue, and all power to everybody’s elbows!
A few weeks ago, I raised the question of what payment mechanisms a data controller must accept for the payment of the £10 fee for a Subject Access Request. I have had a somewhat protracted discussion with the ICO since – see the addendum to my original post. The Information Commissioner’s Office have finally come up with their fully-formed opinion on this, as below:
We have received some further guidance from our policy team who have clarified the situation with regards to SARs and when a fee should be accepted.
As I have previously stated if an organisation do not have the facilities to accept a fee by a certain method then they would not need to create one, as per my previous example regarding PayPal.
In general there is no legal obligation on a data controller to accept a particular method of payment. A data controller can express a preference as to the payment method it would accept, and the data subject should normally comply with this preference where it is reasonable to do so. As we have advised before though, the data controller may on occasion have to have regard to compliance with disability discrimination requirements.
It is also possible for a data subject to express a preference, but, as a payment is to be made to the data controller, agreement would have to be reached with the data controller that this is an acceptable method of payment. The data subject is not able to insist that any recognised legal method of payment should be acceptable to the data controller. Consequently, there is no requirement for the data controller to accept any form of payment just because that is the preference expressed by the data subject.
However, the right of subject access is a basic, fundamental right. This means that it must be sufficiently easy for a data subject to make payment to a data controller in order to exercise that right. Although there may be some cash-only businesses that do not have the facility to process card payments, we believe that the vast majority of organisations do have this facility. Where this is the case, the controller should accept card payments for subject access in order to facilitate the applicant’s request. We would consider it obstructive for the controller to refuse card payments for subject access where it makes and receives card payments for other purposes. The same is true of bank transfers and other payment systems.
My basic tl;dr of the above is that organisations can dictate which mechanism they want applicants to use to pay the SAR fee and the requester can’t override this, though the organisation might have to make a reasonable adjustment for a disabled person and in any case if they have the ability to take payments for other things by alternative mechanisms the ICO would consider them to be obstructive if they don’t accept SAR fees by them. What consequences for the organisation would be had by the ICO thinking them being obstructive isn’t listed, but I suspect naff all, frankly.
If a data subject provides the correct fee in a format which is legally recognised in the UK to denote payment eg cash, cheque or postal order etc. and assuming that they have correctly provided all the other elements of a subject access request eg adequate identification etc, the moment the data controller has received the request (section 7(2)), its obligations under section 7 begin.
A data controller does not have to accept the payment, but the obligation begins nonetheless – acceptance is not a condition of receiving. A data controller is well within its rights to state a preference for a particular format of payment, but it cannot demand it.
To me, that doesn’t fit with what the ICO has just written in the above email to me:
In general there is no legal obligation on a data controller to accept a particular method of payment. … The data subject is not able to insist that any recognised legal method of payment should be acceptable to the data controller. Consequently, there is no requirement for the data controller to accept any form of payment just because that is the preference expressed by the data subject.
Leonard Cheshire have announced that the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded them £242,250 to “enable the charity to use its archives to raise awareness about the history of disabled people“, topped up to £305,500 by two other charities.
Cartoon by the wonderful Crippen / Dave Lupton Cartoons www.crippencartoons.co.uk
For their full, nauseating and uninteresting press release (why do charities write such?),
View press release
From: Selina Mills [mailto:Selina.Mills@leonardcheshire.org]
Sent: 09 October 2015 12:54
To: Selina Mills
Subject: FW: LEADING DISABILITY ARCHIVE PROJECT SECURES MAJOR NATIONAL LOTTERY GRANT
PRESS RELEASE HIGH RES PIX AVAILABLE
Leonard Cheshire Disability ‘REWIND’ project secures £242,250 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)
Archive will show history of disabled people’s lives over 70 years
Project will increase access to archive materials
Total amount raised for the project is £305,500
Leading charity Leonard Cheshire Disability is delighted to have been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of £242,250 which will enable the charity to use its archives to raise awareness about the history of disabled people.
The HLF grant will be used to fund ‘Rewind – seven decades of stories from Leonard Cheshire Disability’ project. It will support vital conservation work, digitise archive material and record new oral history interviews with disabled people. The project will create an accessible website and allow online public access to the collections for the first time.
It comes alongside contributions to the project from the Sobell Foundation and the Brighton and Worthing Charitable Trust. The total amount raised for the project is £305,500.
This project uses archive materials from the home of the founder of the charity, Leonard Cheshire, called ‘Le Court’ which was adapted for its disabled residents. Le Court had a film unit, radio station, publishers, archive and artists group run by disabled people and played a significant role in the beginnings of the disability rights movement.
Stephanie Nield, Leonard Cheshire Disability Archivist, said:
“We have such a rich and diverse archive and as a result, the heritage we hold from Le Court forms a unique part of a rarely documented social and disability history.
“Our founder, Leonard Cheshire, started our charity in 1948 with a single act of kindness when he took disabled veteran Arthur Dykes into his own home to care for him. This is an important step in helping us shape our history to share this dynamic story with the world.”
Stuart McLeod, Head of the Heritage Lottery Fund South East, said: “Thanks to money raised by National Lottery players we’re able to support Leonard Cheshire Disability’s project that will explore, raise awareness and share the heritage of disabled people over the last 70 years. This is particularly timely as 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act – so it’s the perfect time to uncover this largely hidden part of our history.”
A community engagement programme is also planned and will run in six locations in the Home Counties of Surrey, West Sussex, Essex and Kent with trained volunteers assisting community groups to share memories and experiences. Volunteers will also record the oral histories of people who had contact with and experience of the charity Leonard Cheshire Disability, as well as capturing the experience of disabled people over seventy years.
The project will increase the opportunities for of disabled people to talk about and share their experiences of care and capture a unique part of UK social history.
ENDS
For further information, images and interviews, please contact Selina Mills in the Press Office on 020 3242 0298 or on Selina.Mills@leonardcheshire.org
Notes to editors
The Heritage Lottery Fund
Thanks to National Lottery players, we invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about – from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love, from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. www.hlf.org.uk @heritagelottery
Leonard Cheshire Disability is the UK’s largest voluntary sector provider of services to disabled people. We support thousands of people with physical and learning disabilities in the UK and we work with Cheshire partner organisations in 54 countries around the world. We campaign for change and provide innovative services that give disabled people the opportunity to live life their way. Visit www.leonardcheshire.org
I hope the opening-up of Leonard Cheshire’s archives will be “warts and all” and not an exercise in nauseating saccharine-sweet deification of the organisation, but I suspect they will be true to form. (I also hope that they put the £242,350 to good use: shame they can’t use it to pay carers the living wage. Mind you, it wouldn’t even pay a year’s salary of their two highest earning staff.)
The history of Leonard Cheshire Disability is not insignificant to the development of the disabled peoples’ rights movement, throughout the UK and indeed the world; though probably not in the way that they would really like people to believe. I wonder if their archive will release some of the following history.
The seminal Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, the founder of the disabled peoples’ movement and the originators of the Social Model, occurred as a result of Paul Hunt‘s reaction to institutionalised care and segregation in Le Court, the inaugural Leonard Cheshire home.
The residents of Le Court resisted the disabling regime. They did so initially through sending the staff to Coventry in 1956 to 1958. They went on to stage the infamous “pyjama protest” – they instituted a protest of mass defiance of the rule that they had to change into their pyjamas by 6pm. Their protests earned them eviction notices, which Leonard Cheshire served against multiple residents and only rescinded following a direct appeal to Group Captain Leonard Cheshire himself. “Our Len” said that a Cheshire home was a home for life, words which echo down the ages…
Paul felt that these charities, by focussing on Residential Care, were basically wrong. He saw disabled people’s place as being in the community. In addition Paul felt that these existing long established ‘disability’ organisations did not reflect the interests of disabled people and that disabled people should organise and form their own organisations.
The same clarion call across the decades: Leonard Cheshire would have you believe that they are disabled peoples’ mouthpiece, yet they don’t represent disabled people and they don’t always practice what they preach in their own service provision.
I hope the archive will show documents from when residents challenged Leonard Cheshire after LCD chose to close Le Court in 2002. Leonard Cheshire won by creating the legal precedent that (despite being paid hundreds of millions of pounds in taxpayers money) they are not subject to the Human Rights Act, including the obligation to respect disabled peoples’ right to choice over their homes. As a result, they can – and did – shut Le Court against residents’ wishes, evicting the disabled people living there.
I wonder if the archive will include the two pieces of research (by Peter Beresford and Northumbria University) commissioned by LCD’s Trustees but then quietly hidden as they showed that Leonard Cheshire actively undermined residents’ rights to basic everyday choices and support?
Oliver (1990, page 39) points outs that the post-war ‘rescuing’ of disabled adults from other unsuitable provision by the Cheshire Foundation may subsequently be reinterpreted as “incarceration” by historians. Although the organisation would argue that in recent years it has changed to an “enabling” approach, the movement maintains that it “continues to appropriate our language as efficiently as it corrupts our image and comodifies our lives to ensure its thriving status as the leading charity provider of services for disabled people in the UK today” (Carr, 2000).
Perhaps it should include Leonard Cheshire’s tragic failures: incidents where their cost-cutting and incompetence have resulted in people dying. For example, Leonard Cheshire killed one young man because they left an unsupervised voluntary worker who don’t know his care plan, to feed him without supervision, even though the Council paid the home £1,700 per week for his care. (That home eventually shut.)
Leonard Cheshire have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unable to run any new services. For example, Waltham Forrest council abandoned using Leonard Cheshire’s services shortly after appointing them, due to this debacle which caused misery and suffering for many disabled people.
Leonard Cheshire sunk a lot of other people’s money (including mine, from my fees to another care home) into an Acquired Brain Injury unit in Goole. It shut shortly after it opened due to a shortage of clients, because Leonard Cheshire’s regional director annoyed a neurological consultant. Leonard Cheshire had to cut their losses, yet another provider has since opened the same unit. It’s now profitable and providing a decent service.
“Since the closure of the nearly-new 1.5m Leonard Cheshire unit in 2003, people from the Goole area have had to travel to Leeds or York for treatment. But the unit is now reopening in August thanks to a joint venture between the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust (BIRT) and Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Trust (NLAG).” Strange that, I wonder why this Trust could run it but Leonard Cheshire failed…
I hope the published archives include my little comma in the history of the organisation. Leonard Cheshire had the only enforcement notice ever issued against a charity by the Information Commissioner’s Office, after they tried to hide from me that senior managers called me a “git” and a “plonker” and attempted to sabotage funding for a holiday I’d booked, in recompense for me raising issues that residents had been overcharged by hundreds of pounds due to LCD’s failure to follow its own transport procedures.
They then attempted to evict me whilst still going through the façade of mediating with me; resulting in the local safeguarding adults’ board reaching a formal finding that Leonard Cheshire had subjected me to institutional abuse. Leonard Cheshire threatened judicial review, following which the Board re-investigated and concluded that their first conclusion was too light. They unanimously concluded that Leonard Cheshire had subjected me to institutional abuse, and specifically psychological abuse, by a range of senior management over a period of years.
