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Annual Report 2004-2005Foreword by the Secretary of State for Transport A: The Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee B: Activities and achievements in 2004-2005 and future plans C: Work Programme for 2005-2006 D: More information and feedback E: Our Members The Annual Report 2003-2004 has also been made available in Adobe Acrobat and MS Word formats for downloading.
Foreword by the Secretary of State for TransportThe quality of life of 10 million adults and three quarters of a million disabled children in this country depends on them being able to use transport to travel to school, work or leisure activities. It is the duty of all of us involved in transport to ensure that it is accessible to them. The Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee helps my Department to develop, critique and improve our policies and programmes to ensure that they address the needs of disabled people. Naturally the Committee's advice reflects their understanding of the mobility and transport needs of the widest range of disabled people. They are after all appointed on the basis of that expertise. But it is also matched by an understanding of what is realistic, for example in relation to legislation, and practical for the transport industries. That approach has helped to ensure that they are not only valued by Government but that they are respected by disability organisations as well as the transport industries. The Disability Discrimination Act 2005 has provided the opportunity to strengthen the legislation in relation to transport. We will be taking forward a number of regulations over the next year or so and I look to the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee to support us in that task. We will work closely with the Committee to achieve our shared goal of ensuring that disabled people can enjoy the same opportunities to travel as other people in society. Alistair Darling MP Chair's IntroductionDPTAC's commitment to unlocking transport opportunities and unblocking the built environment for disabled people remained as strong as ever, as DPTAC came of age in this, our eighteenth year. DPTAC's nineteenth year was a productive and important one for our Members and for disabled people. In the autumn of 2004 we, with the charity Tripscope, launched the Door to Door Website, after carrying out successful user trials at the Mobility Roadshows in Donington and Edinburgh over the summer. We recognised that, despite improvements in access to public transport, the lack of access to good quality, accurate information about transport and travel continues to be a major barrier to disabled people using both public and private transport. It is often hard to know where to start looking for the wealth of good practice and information. Door to Door bridges this information gap by bringing together all the available information on every aspect of planning and making journeys, to help disabled people to make informed decisions. I am delighted that Door to Door is making such a positive difference to disabled peoples' lives. It accounts for some 18% of all traffic on our website so far this year, and I am very pleased by the very positive feedback from visitors to the site. In the summer we held a successful meeting with disabled people and groups representing them in Manchester. This was an excellent opportunity to hear about the issues that were of greatest concern to them, and to explain the nature of the work that we do. We asked those who attended how useful it had been. They gave us very positive comments about how it had improved their understanding of our work, and provided them with the opportunity to draw our attention to significant local transport issues for disabled people. Several of them have followed up their interest in DPTAC's work by asking for and commenting on the draft 2005-07 Strategy, or for other documents. DPTAC Members themselves also found the process helpful. Along with local groups, they would have liked more time to listen and talk. When DPTAC's resources permit it, we intend to repeat the exercise in other parts of the country. A significant proportion of our effort was directed towards the Disability Discrimination Bill. We welcomed the publication in May 2004 of the report of the Joint Committee on the Bill. The Committee supported almost all the recommendations that we had made for further improvements to the Bill. These included adopting 2017 as the enddate by which rail vehicles should comply with the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations, integrating accessibility improvements such as accessible audio-visual systems into the refurbishment process, and preventing landlords from unreasonably withholding consent for alterations to the home of a disabled person, including common areas. The Government's response in July accepted some of these suggestions, and there was further progress during the passage of the Bill. The Disability Discrimination Act became law on 7 April of this year. The Act requires that the end-date for all rail vehicles to comply with the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations cannot be later than 1 January 2020. In addition, it contains provisions for the recognition of disabled people's parking badges from other countries. It also replaces the stigmatising term "institutional badge" with "organisation" for a badge held by an organisation, as we recommended in our review of the Blue Badge Parking Scheme. Finally it extends protection for disabled people with regard to the letting of premises. We believe that the case that DPTAC made for these provisions helped ensure that they were put into the Bill and made it into the final Act. At the same time that the Bill was going through Parliament, the Government consulted us on its plans to lift the exemption in Part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 for vehicles used on public transport services, vehicle hire services, breakdown services and those used on leisure and tourism services. We also helped the Disability Rights Commission to prepare its draft Codes on the transport exemption and on the new duty on public authorities to promote disability equality. In 2004 Parliament passed the Traffic Management Act, which brought into law two other important recommendations from our review of the Blue Badge Parking Scheme. It provides a power for the police, traffic wardens, local authority parking attendants and civil enforcement officers to require badges issued under the scheme to be produced for inspection. This will be a significant step forward in the enforcement, and therefore the credibility, of the Blue Badge Parking Scheme. We look forward to being consulted in the near future on the draft guidance which will be issued to those enforcement officers and to badge holders before the new power is introduced. We are also following progress of the other recommendations that we made which do not need primary legislation. The House of Commons Transport Committee followed up its 2003 study of "Disabled People's Access to Transport" with a valuable study. Three DPTAC Members, including myself, gave oral evidence to the Committee, and we submitted two written memoranda. The report cited DPTAC ten times, including twice in recommendations. We welcomed the report on 23 February 2005. The Government responded to this report in June 2005. The Committee noted that at present regulations require audio-visual information systems to be provided on trains, but not on buses. This makes it more difficult for blind and partially sighted people in particular to use buses and to combine road and rail journeys. The Committee recommended that "The Government should reconsider whether audio-visual information should be mandatory in buses and coaches." We agreed, and have reflected this in our work programme for the year. On our built environment work, we launched a model inclusion policy which offers architects and others an easy-to-use tool for the promotion and adoption of inclusive design and will help them to deliver it. We disseminated the policy further at a master class we held entitled "Sustainable Communities as Inclusive Communities" at the Sustainable Communities Summit. The event focused on the importance of good design in planning for communities which are sustainable and accessible for all. As well as many meetings with officials and the industry, I was pleased to have the opportunity to update Ministers in our two sponsor departments with the progress that we were making and our plans for the future. I met Phil Hope, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Charlotte Atkins MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport. We were disappointed at the number of entries to our Future Inclusive award for university students and teachers throughout the UK who successfully apply the principles of inclusive design. We do not plan to continue to take it forward as a separate award. We respond to about three consultations a month from government departments, agencies and others to ensure that their policies and guidance documents address the needs of disabled people. You can find the most important of these on our website (www.dptac.gov.uk). At the end of March 2005, the Government decided to move responsibility for the built environment from DPTAC to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), to give the opportunity for CABE to extend its work on inclusive design, work with disabled people and place inclusive design at the heart of the environment, architecture and urban design. In future CABE will sponsor the Built Environment Group (subsequently renamed the Inclusive Environment Group) which was formerly a Working Group of DPTAC. This has entailed changes to our Strategy for 2005-07 and to our Work Programme for 2005-06. In the coming year we will provide some support to the IEG in the transitional period, and look forward to working alongside it in the future in its new incarnation on projects and policies of mutual interest. The dedication of our unpaid Members remains critical to all this work. During the year, five Members left DPTAC, and we thank Sian Baldwin, Peter Barker, Julie Giles, Roy Hayter and Laura Smales for their distinctive contributions. We also welcome three new Members, Sean Bolton, Alan Norton and Katherine Phipps, and expect further appointments in the coming year. As in past years we could not carry out this work without the industries and regulatory authorities of the transport and the built environment with whom we work closely on our and their projects; our sponsors in the Department for Transport's Mobility and Inclusion Unit; and an exceptionally dedicated and skilled Secretariat. We are also grateful for the continuing support of colleagues in the national administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; and other advisory bodies such as the Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland and the Disability Rights Commission, and the individuals and groups who have encouraged us. In the next twelve months we will continue to champion the transport needs of disabled people. The Government's regulations under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 will be a focus for many of our activities. We will also conclude a major review of our guidance on large passenger ships and infrastructure, while in aviation we will develop a specification for an on-board wheelchair, as well as finalising one on making aircraft toilets more accessible. We will also launch a new and exciting resource for primary school teachers on accessible design. The 2005-06 Work Programme in this report contains further details of this and other work. The UK Presidency of the European Union's Council of Ministers and the appointment of new Ministers at the Department for Transport provide further opportunities for us to move towards our goal of ensuring that disabled people can travel where everyone else goes, and can do so easily and without extra cost. Neil Betteridge |
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