-----Original Message-----
From: DRC Master [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 28 September 2007 10:18
To: Davies, Sian
Subject: Celebrating the Journey and Saying Goodbye (bulletin number 66)
Hi Sian,
You have just received a message from DRC Master at Disability Rights
Commission.
Dear friends
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC), which it has been my privilege
to chair since it was established in 2000, is closing today. We make way
for the new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).
www.cehr.org.uk
When we set up the DRC seven and a half years ago, expectations were
high. In our short life we have, I believe, been ground-breaking and
lived up to those early high expectations.
Within two years of opening, we had built a strong case and consulted on
proposals for strengthening the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). The
fruit of this was the DDA 2005. We have taken landmark cases to the
higher courts, which clarified and improved the law through
precedent-setting judgements. The law now has teeth and we have used it
to help many individuals. But we have also increasingly looked to
supplement individual litigation and conciliation with rooting out
systemic discrimination.
We have done this through our formal investigations: into website
inaccessibility, the fact that people with learning disabilities and
mental health problems become ill and die younger than others, and the
unnecessary and intrusive regulation of the health or fitness of
teachers, social workers and nurses. We campaigned for, won and promoted
the disability equality duty, as a crucial new tool to transform public
policy and public services.
We have also tried to change the way that disability is debated in
Britain. Disability is not just a worthy topic of passing human interest
but newsworthy and relevant to the big debates of the age. We have tried
to encourage people to see that equality for disabled people and their
families means a stronger society and economy for everyone.
Perhaps the strongest expression of our case, that equality for disabled
people is at the heart of what is needed to create a successful Britain,
is contained within our Disability Agenda, launched earlier this year.
This is a hugely ambitious programme that looks across nine core areas
of public policy. It explains how getting things right for disabled
people and their families can make a wider contribution to a successful,
happy society for everyone. It is a perspective that we think might
helpfully be mirrored by the new commission, across all areas of
equality.
I, my fellow commissioners and the DRC staff, are immensely proud of our
achievements as the DRC. Today we are publishing an impact report,
called Celebrating the Journey that sets out our achievements over seven
years. Yet we know that we are far from reaching the goal we set for
ourselves back in 2000, of a 'society where disabled people can
participate fully as equal citizens'.
Our time to take this agenda forward has ended. And the future of
disability equality is now within the Equality and Human Rights
Commission, where I will be a commissioner and my fellow DRC and EHRC
commissioner Jane Campbell will chair the Disability Committee.
Just as there were for the DRC, so too there are very high expectations
of the new commission - to change thinking and behaviour and to become
the trusted expert and world leader on disability (as we have been) and
on many other issues.
I leave the EHRC with this challenge and with a word of advice. We
achieved all that we did because we walked in the company of friends.
Friends that we listened to, learned from and worked with.
Friends who supported us in taking on the challenges. Friends who
demanded of us nothing less than the highest ambitions and standards.
Critical friends who told us when we were wrong or could do better.
Thank you, friends of the DRC, for that support. We hope the we have
lived up to at least some of your expectations. I look forward to
working with you in a very different era for equality.
And I finish with a request. Give your support to the EHRC. Give it your
knowledge, your ideas and your energy, as you always gave them to us.
But also demand of it the same high standards as you always, quite
rightly, expected of us.
Thank you.
Sir Bert Massie CBE
For more about the Disability Equality Duty, go to:
www.dotheduty.org
For more about the DRC's 'Maintaining Standards: Promoting Equality'
Formal Investigation go to: www.maintainingstandards.org
For the DRC's final Annual Review, short films, adverts and BSL
information clips go to:
www.celebratingthejourney.org
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