Ms Gillian Kearns:

It is like everything and every support disabled people need to get. It is like talking about, for example, the process of applying for disability allowance. People in the event we had on disabled women in poverty spoke about it being a traumatic experience. Somebody said it took them 12 months to even begin the process because having to write everything down was so traumatic and difficult. I am a carer as well as being disabled and every parent I know speaks about how traumatic filling in the form for disability carer's allowance is. I do not want my child to ever see the form I had to fill in for them and what I had to write down. That is really difficult. The enormous amount of bureaucracy is the thing standing in the way of an awful lot of people. There is then no guarantee. As we mentioned before, people could lose all the other supports they have. There is a huge financial risk for a lot of people in accessing these supports after doing all this work. It is like a full-time job having to apply for a lot of these things, so definitely people need-----