Jeremy reported to the 2006 autumn party conference on the work of the Conference Access Group, of which he is Convenor. Full about the work of the Access Group can be found here.

Coming to Conference can pose a number of challenges for party members with disabilities. But ensuring all our members have the opportunity to be part of policy-making and conference is one of our party’s distinguishing strengths, so two years ago Conference Committee created a Conference Access Group (CAG) to tackle these challenges and make attending conference as smooth as possible.

Since then, the Access Group has worked hard to review all aspects of coming to conference. It contains members with a wide range of disabilities, and its meetings over the last eighteen months have identified more than a hundred individual points aimed at improving access. We have been able to address virtually every single one of these, and as a result disabled access to Liberal Democrat Conference, which was already good at a basic level, has improved significantly and is now extremely good.

One of the longest standing challenges has been ensuring full wheelchair access to all parts of Conference. We have tackled this head on, and now ensure that all areas, both in the Conference Centre and in all the hotels we use, are fully accessible for both standard wheelchairs and the larger motorised scooters. This includes all rooms that we use for fringe meetings.

As part of checking this, we now conduct an advance site visit. A wheelchair user comes as part of the group, and we travel around all areas to check there is enough space, there are lifts which work, and which have enough space to manoeuvre a wheelchair in and out of. We check too for example that there are sufficient disabled loos, that they are all fully equipped and can actually be easily used by a wheelchair user.

If any areas are not accessible, we will not use them. The advance site visit to Brighton identified some fringe rooms which are not accessible, and as a result we have now moved bookings from those rooms into others which are.

One of the other major barriers to people with disabilities coming to conference is the additional costs which it can cause, which in some cases can be very substantial. Tackling this poses us a challenge, as conference has to operate within tight financial constraints, and there is no way that we could reasonably assist with the costs of all those with every kind of disability who come to conference.

But we have now devised a scheme which we believe will help those who are hit hardest. From 2007 any potential conference-goer who normally uses a wheelchair will be able to apply to stay in one of the specially-adapted disabled-friendly rooms – which are normally only in the most expensive hotels – but at the same cost to them as staying in an average B&B. The scheme will be funded by putting an additional levy of £1 on every Conference registration fee for all representatives.

We are very conscious that this will only help some of those with disabilities, but having looked into it we believe it is those who use wheelchairs who tend to bear the brunt of the additional costs, so we are focusing the help that we are able to provide on them. We will, however, keep it under review.

We believe introducing this scheme will be a major step forward for us in making Conference more accessible for people with disabilities – as well as valuably raising the profile of disabled access to conference.

These are just a few of the many things that we have done to improve access at conference – other things we’ve done range from eliminating unnecessary steps on the stage set, and banning nuts, to making conference documents available in different formats. Where we’ve been unable to eliminate a problem – for example, despite the problems it causes for people with epilepsy, unfortunately it’s simply impossible to ban flash photography in the hall during the leader’s speech – we’ve thought creatively: in this case by now putting a warning about flash photography in the Directory.

We’re pleased with what we have achieved so far, but always welcome suggestions for other things we could do.

Practical information for conference-goers with disabilities is now published in the Conference Directory. For more information about the work of the Conference Access Group, please
click here.