My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. I am delighted to be a co-signatory to these amendments as someone who has speech, language and communication needs, as a parent, and as vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
I hope that noble Lords might indulge me if I share a detail of my life that has a considerable bearing on why I am supporting these amendments. Yesterday marked exactly 25 years since I should have died. It is slightly surreal to hear myself say that. Yet I will always remember the answer to my question, “What are the odds on my making a complete recovery from the operation?” The response was to the point: “I am afraid I cannot give you odds on survival”. My life
was saved by the incredible skill of my neurosurgeon, Anne Moore, and maxillo-facial surgeon, Daniel Archer, who went through the back of my mouth to access my spine and brainstem. I lived to tell the tale, obviously, but the shock of losing the ability to speak and the immense sense of isolation and vulnerability that went with that will stay with me for ever, as will the trauma of three frustrating years before further surgery enabled me to speak intelligibly again.
To compound the anguish of that experience by adding domestic abuse to the situation hardly bears thinking about. So, while I cannot speak from the perspective of someone with communication needs who has suffered domestic abuse, my personal experience teaches me that the changes outlined so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, are needed.
A central lesson, for me, of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Equality Act 2010 is that change does not happen by accident. It needs to be continuous and to be codified and embedded in practice. So, I support placing a legal duty on the domestic abuse commissioner to ensure that the good practice they are required to encourage includes the identification of and appropriate support for communication needs, in line with the amendment.
The measures provided for by these amendments are necessary. Local domestic abuse strategies need to detail how the local authority will identify and respond to communication needs. Domestic abuse local partnership boards need to include a speech and language therapist. Rules of court must include the provision of appropriate support for those with communication needs, and any guidance issued under the clause referred to in connection with Amendment 187 should include information on the links between domestic abuse and communication needs and, just as importantly, the impact that witnessing domestic abuse, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, explained so clearly, can have on children’s communication needs.
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There is one other personal point which has a bearing on why I regard these amendments as so necessary. Until I entered your Lordships’ House, I had hardly ever experienced disability discrimination. The organisations I worked for were sensitive to my communication needs and they honoured their legal duty to make reasonable adjustments to how they operated. They would never have signalled to me to speed up while I was speaking, as the noble Baroness the Leader of the House did from the Front Bench only recently. Quite apart from the law, I wonder whether she has given the slightest thought to how much courage it takes to stand up in your Lordships’ House when you have communication needs that are not even acknowledged, let alone accommodated. In any professional, modern workplace, I would be asked whether I needed more time on account of my disability. It is to the detriment of your Lordships’ House that it should act as if it were above the laws on disability discrimination and equality which it helped to bring about. Indeed, we must be one of very few institutions that expects the law to accommodate our procedures rather than the other way around.
In conclusion, I do not want any other body to follow the poor example set by your Lordships’ House. These amendments would help to ensure that that does not happen. That is another reason they are so important to the victims of domestic abuse who have, like me, speech, language and communication needs, and why they deserve a substantive and considered response from the Government.