Ms Amy Hassett:

Nem highlighted a number of the points I had intended to raise. Most disability advocates have followed on from other disability advocates. Somebody will have tapped us on the shoulder at some point and asked us to have a chat about the UNCRPD or various other bits. Anything, therefore, that supports our access to our community is critical.

We have not yet touched on one of other functions of DPOs. While half of what we do is advocacy and is external to the organisation, involving talking to groups and individuals, the other important half of what we do involves talking to our communities, building a sense of community and building networks between disabled people. Some of the most impactful things DWI has done are not necessarily the documents we have written, with all due respect to our appearances before the committee, but our social events. It is about creating space for disabled people to make friends with other disabled people and develop their own communities and networks of support. When we talk about empowering disabled people, from our perspective, we would always advocate that as much as we want disabled people to be independent, we want them to be interdependent. We want them to be dependent on other people but in ways that are empowering to the individual. We want to be able to choose who supports us and helps us. Some of the work of DPOs is just about connecting disabled people with other disabled people in order that they can support one another, and there is no replacement for that anywhere else. The social and community aspect, therefore, is very important, and disability pride and so on come along with that.

In respect of consultation, Nem made a point about caring responsibilities and Deputy Ellis spoke about getting people involved and supporting them and asked what the impacts are for people who have to put their hands in their pockets to fund advocacy. It is difficult and time-consuming to be an advocate. For us to hold a consultation in an accessible way with our members, we cannot hold just one consultation but have to hold three. We have to hold one in the evening to support certain individuals who might work full time, one in the morning for people who may not work in a nine-to-five job, which is a more accessible time, and another at the weekend for people who cannot make the other ones. That is, fundamentally, how we conduct a successful consultation process. We are not going to catch everyone even through that but, because of people having different caring responsibilities, jobs and so on, that is how we have to do it, but that is very difficult. We talk about people having to put their hands in their pockets to fund advocacy, but we have to create the infrastructure around that, which is incredibly difficult when we are talking about a community who are already living in poverty at higher rates or at greater risk of doing so, with the additional costs of disability and all the issues we speak about at almost meeting we attend.

With regard to how we support individuals in their self-advocacy, we do not have the resources or training to support people with individual cases, so wherever we can, we refer them on to other organisations that have that capacity. Even understanding where to send people or what to tell them to help them is a long process. It takes time for us to develop our internal capacity to say that if someone is experiencing a given problem, he or she will need to talk to the WRC and not another body, or that he or she needs to go to the National Advocacy Service regarding a particular issue. Even that sort of capacity-building takes time and is very difficult.

I wish to highlight two matters relating to previous comments. The guidelines on involving disabled people in consultation have been updated as of 2022 and are available on the NDA website. They have been updated since 2014. That update was released in September 2020.

As regards advocacy skills and children, one of the challenges is that there are currently no DPOs that focus on disabled children. The involvement of disabled children in decision-making and having their voices heard is a massive area of concern for us and other DPOs. There is a need to focus on ensuring disabled children specifically, as well as children more broadly, have their voices heard and their decisions respected and things like that. That is essential but it is not currently being considered. There is a need to focus on it moving forward.