Ideas Meeting to End Harassment

posted: 13/12/2010

What should the council, NHS and other public bodies be doing to stop HIV abuse and harassment? People with HIV, their partners and friends can put forward ideas and have a say at a meeting in Manchester in late January. 

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission are holding a meeting for the families, friends and survivors of disability-related harassment (including HIV abuse).

Legal duty to end harassment

Public bodies all have a legal duty to ‘eliminate’ disability-related harassment and its causes. HIV abuse, threats and violence are all examples of disability-related harassment.

Most public bodies are doing nothing effective to ‘eliminate’ HIV and other forms of disability harassment. Because of the stigma associated with HIV public bodies should be prioritising the ending of HIV stigma and its causes.

What should public bodies be doing?
There is almost no limit to the creative (and cheap) ways public bodies could promote better public attitudes to people with HIV.

• The Local Government Improvement and Development website has top tips and case studies on improving ‘ community cohesion’
• The Institute for Community Cohesion also has resources, toolkits and case studies  

Ask to take part 

If you have been directly affected by disability-related harassment for example because of HIV, or someone you know has, and you would like to attend the meeting, please tell them as soon as possible. They will then invite you and send you the details of the meeting. There are only a limited number of seats so please book early. Email or telephone the Equality and Human Rights Commission: 0161 829 8174

This Manchester meeting will begin on Monday 24 January at 1pm and end by 5pm.
 

Please note this meeting is only for people who have experience of disability-related harassment.

Campaigning actions

During 2010 George House Trust has been encouraging people with HIV and HIV organisations to take part in this Disability Harassment Inquiry.

The commission has powers to order public bodies to take action and expects to publish its report and recommendations in the first part of 2011.

Find out more about the commission’s Inquiry into disability related harassment

Health and Care Standards

posted: 28/10/2010

There is a new law regulating health and adult social care services in England. From the start of this month every health and adult social care service in England is legally responsible for making sure it meets new essential standards of quality and safety.

The Care Quality Commission registers, licenses and monitors health and care services using these standards. The standards apply to most health services, council social services and care homes, nursing homes, councils, home care, and shared lives schemes.

The essential care quality standards
1. You can expect to be involved and told what’s happening at every stage of your care

• You will always be involved in discussions about your care and treatment, and your privacy and dignity will be respected by all staff.
• You will be given opportunities, encouragement and support to promote your independence.
• You will be able to agree or reject any type of examination, care, treatment or support before you receive it.
   

2. You can expect care, treatment and support that meets your needs

• Your personal needs will be assessed to make sure you get care that is safe and supports your rights. You will get the food and drink you need to meet your dietary needs.
• You will get safe and co-ordinated care where more than one care provider is involved or if you are moved between services.

3. You can expect to be safe

• You will be protected from abuse or the risk of abuse, and staff will respect your human rights.
• You will be cared for in a clean environment where you are protected from infection.
• You will get the medicines you need, when you need them, and in a safe way.
• You will be cared for in a safe and accessible place that will help you as you recover.
• You will not be harmed by unsafe or unsuitable equipment.

4. You can expect to be cared for by qualified staff

• Your health and welfare needs are met by staff who are properly qualified.
• There will always be enough members of staff available to keep you safe and meet your health and welfare needs.
• You will be looked after by staff who are well managed and have the chance to develop and improve their skills.

5. You can expect your care provider to constantly check the quality of its services

• Your care provider will continuously monitor the quality of its services to make sure you are safe.
• If you, or someone acting on your behalf makes a complaint, you will be listened to and it will be acted upon properly.
• Your personal records, including medical records, will be accurate and kept safe and confidential.

How is the new system different?

The Care Quality Commission looks at the care people get, rather than at any systems and processes. They say they listen to what people say about their treatment, care and support. They check how care services are meeting essential standards now, rather than looking at the past.

The Commission has wide powers to act if they find that a care service is not meeting the essential standards. It regulates:

• Medical and clinical treatment given to people of all ages, including treatment given in hospitals, ambulance services, and mental health services. 
• Care provided in residential homes, in the community, in people’s own homes for adults, and in residential care homes for children. The Commission focus on more vulnerable people, including people with physical disabilities and long-term health conditions (such as HIV).
• Services for people whose rights are restricted under the Mental Health Act.
• Care provided either by the NHS or independently.
   

More information at their website and booklet

Guidance on Cuts, Equality and Fairness

posted: 28/10/2010

In making cuts and changes to services, public bodies have to obey equality law. Equality law does not prevent public bodies from making difficult decisions about reorganisation, relocation, redundancies, and service cuts, nor does the law stop public authorities from making decisions that may affect one group more than another.

A Must: Equality Impact Assessments
But the public equality duties do enable public authorities to show they are making decisions in a fair, transparent and accountable way, considering the needs and the rights of different members of their community.

The law says public bodies have to carry out an assessment of the impact that changes to policies, procedures and practices could have on different equality groups. These assessments help public bodies make better decisions, based on robust evidence. Public bodies must then 'have regard to' the impact any changes and cuts would have on sections of the community protected by equality law.

The assessment does not have to be a document called an Equality Impact Assessment, although this is what the Equality and Human Rights Commission recommends, as it helps public authorities:

• ensure they have a written record of the equality considerations they have taken into account
• ensure that their decision includes a consideration of the actions that would help to avoid or mitigate any unfair impact on particular equality groups
• make their decisions based on robust evidence
• make the decision-making process more transparent
• comply with the law.

If an Equality Impact Assessment is not done, then the public body must use an another method to systematically assess any adverse impact of a change in policy, procedure or practice.

It is a legal obligation which should remain a top priority, even in times of economic difficulty. Failure may result in authorities facing costly, time-consuming and reputation-damaging legal challenges.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched a short guide to help put fairness and transparency at the heart of the difficult financial decisions through meeting the legal obligation to assess equality impact. The guide covers:

• What the law requires now
• What the law requires from April 2011
• Guidance (for practitioners and decision-makers)
• Relevant case law
• Best practice examples
• FAQs Public authorities and service providers
• FAQs Service users and organisations

Short Guide

Full details

Budget Cuts Threat

posted: 26/08/2010

Amid the renewed criticism that the June budget affects the poor and people with disabilities such as HIV worst of all, despite government claims that it is ‘fair,’ and 'progressive,' Britain's equalities watchdog has now warned it could take action. If ministers have failed to carry out the legally required assessment of the impact on vulnerable people, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has now threatened action.
 

The Institute for Fiscal Studies described the budget yesterday as "clearly regressive". The respected and impartial think tank did a far more detailed study than it could just after the budget, and has now taken into account things like changes to Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit and Tax Credit, and has found that these and all the other changes mean people with incomes in the poorest tenth of the population are the biggest losers in the budget.
 

Equalities warning

Neil Kinghan, the EHRC's director general, issued his warning after Mark Hoban, the Treasury minister, stonewalled questions on the BBC Radio4 Today programme about whether the government had carried out a statutory assessment of the impact of the budget on women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and the elderly.
 

Kinghan said: "It is for the Treasury to demonstrate it has complied with legislation and assessed the impact of its decisions on vulnerable groups. If it cannot do so, then the commission will have to consider appropriate enforcement action."
 

Source

Report on Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of the affect of the budget on different parts of the population
Institute for Fiscal Studies' own analysis of the budget

Budget Pain Worse With HIV

posted: 24/06/2010

Low income is a major problem already for many people living with HIV. The emergency budget and service cuts will now make a bad situation even worse.

Here we try to pick out how the budget that is claimed to be ‘tough but fair’ will affect people living with HIV in NW England. We find out how tough and unfair it will be on many people living with HIV.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis shows that the poorest 10% of the population (typically people on benefits and workers on the minimum wage) will face the worst financial pain of the whole population. Excluding cuts in Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit and funding for important public services like social care, over the next five years they worked out that the spending power of the poorest 10% of the population will fall by 2.6%.

Add in the affect of changes in disability living allowance, housing benefit cuts and cuts to public services and the poorer part of the population will suffer even more than this.

The budget will cut the incomes of the richest 10% of the population by just 0.6% compared with over 2.6% for the lowest income tenth of the population. How fair is that?
 

What we have to tell you below makes for depressing reading.

We think people with HIV have a right to know how the planned changes over the next five years could affect them.

These changes are not all cast in stone. They have to go through Parliament and you can tell your MP what you think.
 

Disability Living Allowance
Many people with HIV receive Disability Living Allowance (DLA), a benefit paid at different rates to compensate for disability and mobility problems. The budget announced that people on DLA will have a strict new medical examination; these medical examinations will start in 2013. Some people will lose DLA, others will go onto a lower rate. The government aims to cut spending by £1.4 billion within two years of these medicals starting.

We do not know yet if people who have DLA ‘for life’ will have these medicals.
 

Housing Benefit
Housing Benefit / Housing Allowance will be cut after one year by 10% for people claiming Job Seekers Allowance. The amount of Housing Benefit will also be capped, depending on how many bedrooms you have.This and other changes will be cuts costing people on the benefit £1.8 billion a year.

People will either have to pay the extra for their rent from their other income, move somewhere cheaper or smaller, and if evicted for rent arrears are likely to be refused rehousing as a homeless person. Eviction for rent arrears is treated as making yourself intentionally homeless so people are not entitled to be rehoused.
 

Unemployment
There are around 2.5 million people unemployed and about 0.5 million job vacancies. Unemployment is higher in NW England than most other regions. The job vacancies are often low paid.

The budget alone will increase unemployment by another 100,000 and independent experts expect it to reach close to 3 million.

Job seeking prospects will worsen and it is already harder to find work with a condition like HIV.
 

Slow-burn cuts and taxes
Over the next five years people on benefits will slip further behind in what their benefits will be able to buy and with tax changes.

VAT rises at the beginning of January to 20% and VAT always hits people on low incomes hardest.

Most benefits will be uprated for inflation in a new way that will leave people increasingly worse off. This will cut £6 billion from benefits over the next five years.

Child Benefit is frozen for three years from next April – a £3billion cut. Parents who are working will be compensated by Tax Credits, but that doesn’t help parents who aren’t working.
 

Social Services
Local Government and other public services are most used by people who are on lower incomes. Social Services departments of local councils now face cuts of between 25-33%. Social Services provide essential services to people with HIV and they help fund HIV community services like George House Trust.

The AIDS Support Grant which is used to pay for extra support for people with HIV and community HIV services is no longer protected by a ‘ring-fence’. This means councils can now spend it on whatever they like.

We don’t know yet how cuts of between one quarter and one third will affect essential social services for people with HIV and community organisations but we should start to know more from October. We can expect some painful cuts and changes.
 

NHS cuts
The NHS in NW England has been told to save almost £1 billion within the next three years. We do not know whether this will affect people with HIV.
 

State Pension Age to rise sooner
Details are sparse but the government is planning to raise the age at which men and women will get a state pension sooner than was planned. Men who are now 59 will have to work one more year before they can claim a state pension. Pension age will be 66, not 65 as now, for men from 2016. It does not stop there.

They are consulting about raising the pesnion age to possibly 70. Pension ages for women and men could be raised by one year every five years until it reaches 70 for both sexes. If they start this in 2016 as they say they now plan to, men now aged 40 would not get a state pension until they reach 70. Three out of four people will have some disability by the age of 68. Many people with HIV (among many others) are not fit enough to work until the current pension age of 65, particularly in a region like NW England.

Benefit cuts and changes will make it harder for people with disabilities like HIV to live with a decent fair income before pension age.
 

Expect more pain
In October the government will publish its Public Expenditure Review. We can expect lots more cuts in government spending. The government is already saying that it will try to reduce cuts in education and some other public services (but it has not said that it wants to protect social services) by making even more cuts and changes to benefits.
 

Since the second world war, no government has managed to cut public spending for more than two years in a row. This government plans five years of cuts.
 

Some reputable economic commentators, and President Obama, are warning that European countries are behaving like a panicking herd, cutting spending harshly and that this has a high risk of plunging the world into recession once again. The harsh medicine of cuts could kill economic recovery and make the situation even worse.
 

Heath Inequality
The Marmot Review earlier this year was to help the government plan policies that will end harsh health inequalities. It showed that the poor die 7 years younger than the rich, and the poor become disabled 17 years sooner. Cuts to services and benefits in NW England will worsen the already bad record of ill-health, disabilities and early deaths in this region. More unemployment and low income harms people’s health and well-being.

Reductions in benefits, and those 25%+ public service cuts expected in the Autumn Spending Review are estimated to increase alcohol related deaths by about 2.8% and cardiovascular deaths by 1.2%. Both of these disproportionately affect people living with HIV. Every £80 cut in social welfare spending per person causes this, according to a Europe-wide analysis by Oxford University epidemiologist David Stuckler, reported in the Guardian on 25 June and in the British Medical Journal. There are likely to be between 6,500  and 38,000 more deaths in the next ten years. If the economy worsens, extra deaths rise steeply. Apart from benefits cuts, it is cuts to social services and health budgets especially that cause the most health harm. 

The Treasury is ending the public sector agreement with the NHS to raise the life expectancy of the poor. Marmot presented the government with a vision and plan to make sure everyone has a ‘healthy income’, enough money to live healthy lives and improve life expectancy.

The budget and cuts to come make it even more likely we will go backwards and poorer people and people with disabilities, like many people with HIV in NW England, will face worsening life expectancy and poorer health.

Sit back or act?
These changes are not all cast in stone. They have to be passed by Parliament and you can tell your MP what you think. With your postcode you can contact your own MP here.

Help for people on Low Incomes on our website