As well as, and completely separate to DPAC’s complaint to the UN Committee for Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) there is a thing called the Periodic Reporting Cycle. That means every few years each government that has signed the UN Treaty on Persons with Disabilities (which the UK has done) has to give a report to the UN Committee on how well it is complying with the Treaty.

Of course every government is going to produce a report on itself saying it’s doing great and everything is going just fine – especially our much loathed Tory Government.

UK who also produce a shadow report. In our case this is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission plus the devolved equivalents for Scotland and Northern Ireland . But they’re also funded by the government and of course this is also the same Equality and Human Rights Commission (keep thinking about the name) who However there is also a supposedly independent monitoring body for theUKwho also produce a shadow report. In our case this is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission plus the devolved equivalents forScotlandandNorthern Ireland. But they’re also funded by the government and of course this is also the same Equality and Human Rights Commission (keep thinking about the name) who recently sacked 12 workers by email giving them 24 hours to clear their desks and leave after years of service . 9 of those sacked in this appalling way are BME and 6 are also disabled people.

And perhaps unbelievably although sadly true one of the disabled workers has had their powered wheelchair taken away from them by EHRC who claim as it was provided by Access to Work funding so it belongs to them and not the person who needs to use it.

Oh and by the way DRUK also has a commercial side and the commercial side has a contract with Maximus to provide disability training to WCA assesors

Added to this shadow report we have another one produced by DRUK, Inclusion Scotland, Disability Wales and a Northern Ireland DPO but again the funding for this came from the government via EHRC.

So to cut a long story short, EHRC and DRUK etc publish their submissions to the UN – and we at DPAC get to look at them – which is when the wheels start to fall off this establishment bandwagon.

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So the upshot of all this is that DPAC along with our allies Inclusion London and Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (RoFA) went ahead and wrote our own Independent Shadow Report – we had no invite from the government to do this and we certainly got no money from the government for it, but we wanted this job done properly.

Its important that the UN Committee gets to see an un-varnished, full, detailed account of the effects of UK government attacked on disabled people. And we had no confidence that the semi-official bodies were willing or even able to produce one.

So our small team of researchers and writers at DPAC, Inclusion London and Rofa got together and we did our own.

It has already been submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and this week, on Monday, representatives from DPAC, IL and Rofa will be joining the EHRC and Druk representatives in the UN in Geneva to present our reports to the committee.

You can see the DPAC/IL/RoFA submissions to the committee here: