Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast. In the run-up to the Housing and Social Care Accessibility Summit in September, our guest is campaigning MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy.

Pam represents a Glasgow regional seat and is deputy convener of the cross-party parliamentary group on disability. And we’re very much looking forward to Pam chairing this session at the summit in September. I’m Kieran Findlay, the editor of Scottish Housing News and co-host Jimmy Black is here too.

Pam, welcome to the podcast. You recently contributed to a report by the Health and Social Care Alliance about human rights and disability. The report seemed to suggest that people think human rights are not a problem here. Is that true?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

It’s true that the report suggests that some of that is the case, but to be honest with you, think human rights of disabled people have taken a nose-dive in recent years.

The situation is particularly acute when it comes to housing and social care and in particular in Glasgow if I was to look at my case work across the piece, which of course I do on a regular basis, housing, social care and education for disabled people in general are the three things that I spend most of my time trying to resolve for people and they don’t have the very basics of human rights.

So in some cases, it’s about the right to mobility and to move around. They can’t get in and out of their own home. If it’s about the right to work, well they can’t get in and out of their own home, therefore they can’t always work or they can’t get to their work. Of course, we can work at home, but as you’ll understand that’s not always the case for every situation. It’s also not what people want all the time. So that’s a problem, the very basics. And they struggle to get the social care they need to do so as well.

So all of those things which are human rights to be able to look after your own body and mind, to move about the country and to move about the city or the area that you live and to work are all things that disabled people see being a huge challenge for them on daily basis.

Jimmy Black

Pam, I used to be a councillor and a common complaint I used to get, like you I think, is that people were being refused a ramp into their homes or maybe a stairlift. What effect does living in an unsuitable home have on your ability to lead an independent life?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

So if you can’t get something like an adaption, so if you can’t get a ramp to get in and out of your house, then you can’t get in and out your house. If you can’t get in and out of your house, you can’t see family and friends, you can’t go to them at least to see them, you can’t change your surroundings, you can’t go out to work, you have to rely on a very insular situation, potentially working quite close to home or indeed in home. You can’t get out and do your shopping, you can’t go into appointments that other people do. You can’t do all of the things that people take for granted if you can’t get in and out of your house.

And for some people, it’s literally the simple solution of a ramp being provided or a grab rail being provided. And then it can transform lives. It can make people feel far more dignified because it means they can get in and out on their own in some cases. And it can really open up people’s lives if you can imagine being trapped in your own home.

So I remember during Covid, one of the things that I thought, so everybody, the whole entire country, in fact the world obviously, couldn’t leave their own home. And look how much that affected people’s mental health. Look what people thought when they were told, you can’t go outside your house now. Well imagine for disabled people and the people who don’t have the adaptations they need in their own home, particularly like a ramp or a grab rail or whatever, they’ve never been able to get in and out of their own home or they’re not able to get in and their own home. If it’s not good enough, if society’s not prepared to accept that kind of level of restriction for themselves, which they shouldn’t then we shouldn’t also accept it for disabled people.

Jimmy Black

Can I just follow up on that with the question about the way that you get money to have adaptations to your house? It seems to be a complicated system if you’re in a housing association or if you’re in a council or if you’re a private tenant or an owner. It seems to be different and have you got any thoughts about how that system could be reformed?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

Yeah, so it is really tricky. Part of the problem for disabled people is not having the information that they need. I’ve often said that not everything can be made accessible. Not everything can be made accessible. Now I think there’s heck of a lot more than is currently accessible that could be made accessible. But not everything can be. And that’s okay. And most disabled people understand that. But what we do need is information because where access hasn’t been able to be provided, information is key. And part of the biggest problem that disabled people face are what I would call bureaucratic, huge bureaucratic barriers to their participation in society.

And actually, that can have a huge impact on their mental health, huge impact on their health and wellbeing in general. Because if you have to spend most of your day, and indeed most of your days, for some people it can be weeks and months, trying to navigate systems that aren’t the kind of one-stop shop or aren’t easy because they’ll say to you, well, you’re a private tenant, we need to go through this loophole, you’re a social tenant, you need to go through this loophole, you private let, you own your home, all of these things for disabled people mean different routes to solutions.

And I understand that in some cases that is needed, but actually if we could make that much more slick, if we could make that where a disabled person would go to one point of contact and say, are my circumstances, this is what I require, and then they could get the help to navigate the system instead of having the project manage their own life.

Kieran Findlay

Scottish Labour raised many of these issues way back in 2018. It said then that thousands of disabled people across Scotland are being let down by a lack of accessible housing. What, if anything, has changed since then? Has there been any improvements?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

I’m sad to say, and I’m really sorry to say this, it brings me no joy at all, that no, the situation has not got any better. And in fact, in many, ways, it’s got worse. So there’s been a housing emergency declared in Scotland. And that emergency includes disabled people too. So we know there’s about 639,000 people in housing need in Scotland. 85,000 of those people are disabled people. 40,000 disabled people are on waiting lists to access waiting lists to get an accessible home. And we know that this situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon because of the 22% cut that the Scottish Government have given to the affordable housing programme, many of which, many of disabled people do try to access that as a means to finding a home. So we know that’s going to have a disproportionate impact on disabled people.

And so all of that together means that social rented landlords have said that it’s possible that there could be a 17% reduction in the number of houses that they’re able to build over the next year. There will be far, far fewer houses built for social use and social rent than there were before this cut to the affordable housing programme was made. So that’s a massive problem for disabled people. So the situation has got so much worse since the work that the Scottish Labour Party did to push the then SNP government and still an SNP government of course to try and change this.

Kieran Findlay

You were appointed to lead a public consultation on accessible housing, then that fed into the wider Labour Party commission on housing.

One of its key recommendations was that 10% of all new builds should be wheelchair accessible. I think you also wanted that standard built into the national planning framework 4 - NPF4. How far did you get with that?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

So we still continue to call for that standard to be applied across the piece. The government, as far as I’m aware, are continuing to say that it’s up to local authorities to determine the housing need and demand and then of course you therefore have 32 ways to do that.

Glasgow, I’m pleased to say, does have a stipulation of that, but what we don’t have here is the regular compliance with it. So we know that in some cases some of the housing developments that are built are not meeting that 10% requirement. And that’s partly because it’s not in legislation and is really just in guidance. And it’s partly because it depends on who’s building the houses as well. So sometimes you need to have more space to build an accessible house for wheelchair-accessible houses than you would for a non-wheelchair-accessible house. And so in some cases, the house builders are not always meeting that particular target. We do need a more laser-focused change in planning. We need a direction from the Scottish Government to meet those requirements and that they expect them to be met and that they will monitor whether they are or not.

We know we’re not going to solve this problem if we continue to build houses that are not fit for disabled people in the future. We’ve got, part of the housing problem that disabled people face is that not only are not enough new builds being built for them that are accessible, but we’ve got a whole rolling stock of houses that were built in some of in areas, particularly in tenement to properties in Glasgow, where they were built and these kind of things weren’t really a feature. And you know, that’s the case, but that’s where things like adaptations come in but it also means we shouldn’t continue to make this mistake in the future.

We know that we end up having to spend a lot of money adapting properties because they’re not accessible. It’s far, far better to get it right from plan and indeed far better to try and get it right from stage one at the plan so that if you can identify the person who’s going to move into a property, then obviously you can make the build much, much more accessible from before they’ve barely even laid a brick. In actual fact, in some cases, that would save the public person in longer-term.

So we need to look at what demands are we making when we put in planning? What are we asking about the local need and demand? Do we know, for example, how many people need wheelchair-accessible properties? Do we know how many people need different standards of accessible properties, not necessarily wheelchair-accessible properties? And do we know what the demographics are going to look like in the future? And I know that housing need and demand strategies are supposed to do that, but we also know that they’re not always engaging as much as they should be with disabled people in their population to really understand the proper needs and demand in the future, that needs to be addressed.

Jimmy Black

But you know, it’s getting harder and harder to find the money to build the number of houses that we need. Yes, the government cut the affordable housing supply programme and we’ve covered that in the podcast. But if houses have to be of Passivhaus standard, if houses have to have more expensive heating systems in and if they have to include features for disabled people that might never actually be used because only a small percentage of the population are disabled, then it all becomes very unaffordable. What’s your response to that? Why do we have to build disabled-friendly features into houses when actually, in many cases, they’ll never be used?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

So I’m not advocating that we build all of our houses to inaccessible standards. I’m advocating that we do that to a 10% standard because that’s the level that we know, or that we believe through all the evidence that’s been gathered would meet the real demand that’s out there from disabled people. 10% of properties being accessible is not a huge amount. And yes, it might cost a bit more to make them accessible, but it will cost an awful lot more to have to adapt them retrospectively. And whilst I recognise that it’s a small percentage of the population, I think at the last census about 24% of the population were disabled, not all of them will need adaptations to houses and not all of them will be wheelchair users so the figure will be smaller again and I appreciate that and I completely understand it but often many of us will grow old and things will need to change in the future so we do need to make sure that we’re building houses that people can live in for life.

We also have to understand that families will also expect to able to get in and out of accommodation easily so we need to make sure that people can get in and out with buggies and prams, but also nobody’s really wanting to humph a lot of shopping up and down stairs without having access to something like a lift. So some of these basic things actually would just benefit the general population. I’m not suggesting that we bespoke build for a very, very specific, unique circumstance at a mass scale, but I am suggesting that there are changes that can be made to make properties much, much more accessible for everyone. And if we look at all the evidence that exists, at least about 10% of those should be made to a wheelchair-accessible standard.

Jimmy Black

Now, just a quick follow up on that. One of the things that councils are doing, North Lanarkshire in particular, doing, knocking down multi-storey flats. Multi-storey flats, might not be perfect, but generally, apart from the kind of quirky ones that have, know, masonettes inside them, multi-storey flats are generally wheelchair accessible because there are lifts to every floor. Are we doing the right thing? I mean, should we, do people actually think about disability when they decide to knock down a building because it’s a multi.

Pam Duncan-Glancy

I’m not sure that it’s a common feature and part of the problem is that disabled people are often the last to be asked, they’re the last to be consulted, they can easily be forgotten about for a number of reasons, not least because the point you made about the percentage of them who are in the population and if you’re not around the table they’re not also represented in planning committees on the way that they maybe should were not represented in how in rooms where decisions are being made. So for all those reasons, it’s easy to forget that some people might find them accessible.

And the thing about the high rise flats is the thing with any flat that requires access to anything above the ground floor, which is that you need to make sure that the lift that’s in is fit for purpose. You need to make sure that potential and ideally you would have two lifts serving each floor so that if one was out, another was available.

You also need to be making sure that the contract to maintain a lift is such that if the lift was broken for any period, that it would be repaired pretty quickly. And if someone was stuck in it, would be, they would be helped to get out of it within hours and certainly not days. I’ve got casework with flats in Glasgow that have got lifts in them. And in some cases, one lift serving each floor. And I understand the implications of the cost of that as well. So I’m not naive to that.

But where they’ve got one lift serving each floor and one person in particular, and that building’s been unable to leave the house for eight weeks at a time because the lift has taken so long to service. And the reason it’s taken so long to service is because it’s such an old lift, the parts are no longer easily available. So for all of those reasons, it’s really, really important that we think about it. Like, what if you are building something from scratch and you’re using lifts to access higher floors, which I think is something we’ll have to do because we don’t have the space to build only bungalows and people want a whole host of different types of tenures and styles of buildings and flats as well.

And so we have to think about these things, but we should be making sure that somebody is considering what does it mean for the contract and the repairs to the lift? What does it mean for the number of how would you access the floors above ground if the lift was out? How quickly could it be repaired? For example, if there was only one left, but there was a guarantee that such a serviceable lift, for want of a better way of putting it, that it would always be fixed within a day. That’s probably a reasonable answer to we’ll put one in but the service contract means that we’ll get you in and out quickly if we have to. So all of these things are things that can be thought about. But it’s fairly simple solutions that can be overlooked because disabled people aren’t in the room where decisions are getting taken.

Kieran Findlay

The Labour Party Commission on Housing also suggested that a national database of accessible and adaptation-ready homes should be created for the private market. To make it easy as possible for disabled people to find the home that they want to live in, I like that idea, it seems very sensible and I don’t think it would take much to implement, why hasn’t it been done?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

So I agree, I think it’s perfectly sensible and a lot of the case work that I get is people come in and saying that they would like, or they need an accessible house, but they would like help to apply because they’ve got to apply to different providers. Now, some of them have even come to me and said, you know, I would move out of the area if it meant I could have an accessible house. So it’s all about trying to give disabled people options. Now, we shouldn’t require people to move completely out of an area just to get an accessible house.

But for some disabled people it’s an option and they’d be happy to take it if it meant that they could have a house that they could get in and use properly. The other thing is that people move around for various reasons. I’ve had constituents come to me to say that they, know, constituents from Perth for example, who might want to come and study in Glasgow, but they don’t know how they’re going to get an accessible house when they get here because they don’t know what’s readily available. And again, it goes back to my point about information. Information is really important in that sense because even if you’re looking at, for example, someone who’s buying a house.

If you’re looking at the likes of Rightmove or S1 Homes or other suppliers and estate agents are available obviously. But if you’re looking through them, they don’t always indicate how accessible a house is. It would be helpful to be able to just work that out quite easily through being able to put it in as a filter function. That would be helpful to be able to do that on a national basis for registered social properties as well, as well as probably private let.

So that people could just understand what’s available to them and you know if you could move somewhere if it would mean that they would be in a house that they could get in and out more quickly than waiting in the area they were staying in order for something to become available then that would be part of a solution I think.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah I guess there would just need to be a minimum standard of accessibility that’s agreed upon because some people’s accessible is not for everyone. How do you square that circle?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

Yeah and actually that’s a circle that needs squared on an almost daily basis as a disabled person. know, if you go away anywhere and you happen to look on TripAdvisor to see what restaurant you might want to look at, or you want to eat in someone’s version of that was accessible, it’s very different to someone else’s. So yes, that’s something that disabled people have to grapple with all the time. There’s no easy answer to that. But what you can do at the very least is you could make information like, you know, it’s got the stepped access, there are some areas in the property that have steps and no other way to access them but steps. There is a wet floor shower or there is a bath.

So some of these bits of information you can see because you see photos and you can say, that’s a bath. I don’t see a shower there. But something simple like, there are areas in this property that are only accessible by step. The front door is only accessible by steps. Like when I was looking for my own house, the number of houses we couldn’t even go into view because you just couldn’t get in the front door.

And even some accessible properties with lifts once you’re in. And this is across tenure, by the way. When I’ve been door-knocking in the recent election, for example, you go out and about and some properties will have lifts in them. But just to get in the front door to get to the lift, there’s two or three steps. So having that kind of information would be really, really helpful. It would be also helpful to not do that when we’re building new ones. yeah, some basic information. And again, it would be about consulting with disabled people in their organisations.

Euan’s Guide did a great job of it when it comes to accessing cafes, restaurants, bars, social spaces, libraries. He’s done a really, really good job in Hemini’s organisation of trying to make information available to people. Something like that for housing could be helpful.

Jimmy Black

Physical shape of houses is one thing, but even the most accessible house is no use without the right care package. So people with disabilities are all different and they’ve got different requirements. Is there actually a way of getting this right for everyone?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

Yeah, and I think the way to do that is for health and social care and housing to work together in a really sensible collegiate joined-up way. It doesn’t always happen. I think everybody knows that. It’s probably why the question’s there.

Certainly, I have a lot of case work on that. I think those parts of councils working much, more closely together would be important. when we’re designing legislation like the National Care Service or when we’re housing legislation, making sure that we’re maximising any opportunity to encourage different departments within councils and services to talk to one another so that it is a seamless process.

I’ve got a situation right now where I’ve got a constituent who’s been in a social social rented property needs to move out for work to be done to it. In order to do that, her care will have to be provided in a different place. The way the care is provided is quite restrictive in terms of her control over it. It’s provided on a sort of take it in this environment sort of approach. That’s taken quite a long time to untangle for her and it shouldn’t take having to get your MSP involved for that to have to, for that process just to happen.

Social services and housing departments should be able to talk to each other and try and just make the process much easier. Again, it’s another example of a disabled person having to be at the centre of everything in their own life, which incidentally is important, but being a project manager for every single aspect of your life can really be tiring.

Jimmy Black

That was something I found as a councillor is I sometimes felt I was the only person that actually had access to all the strands and all the threads of what was going on. I could talk to all the departments, I could talk to the disabled person, but nobody else seemed to have that overview. And of course, councillors, they don’t always take any notice of us, know.

Anyway, I was going to ask you another question about care. The Scottish Government has invested heavily in encouraging local authorities and the NHS to deploy technology-enabled care and it’s something that doesn’t seem to come up. There seems to be lot of resistance to it. What role do you think that tech can play in helping people with disabilities live independent lives?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

I think it’s got huge potential. I think where you’re seeing people worried about it or reticent to embrace it, perhaps on the scale that they might, is because for some disabled people, against the backdrop of swingeing cuts to local authorities, the worry is that this is just the cheaper alternative. And if they were to say, yes that actually would be quite a useful technological solution, but it comes at the expense of having a human being in my life. And actually that human being can do more than just that particular piece of tech can do. That’s why people are worried about it, because against the backdrop of cuts, people don’t want to be told we’ll find a computerised or a robotic solution to that so that we can save money.

But actually, some of those solutions could be really helpful. So for example, I’ve seen things like Alexa or Google Home being used in really innovative ways to support people with mental ill health to remind people to take medication, to remind people to sort of stick to a bit of a routine, which is quite good for mental health, for example. There’s also really, really good examples of, I went out to visit a Blantyre facility where they showed me a really, really good example of a house that had been quite well enabled in terms of tech. They could do loads of stuff for the people who live in it if they needed a lot of help. And all of that would be really, really good.

The fear is against the backdrop of cuts, people don’t want, they’re frightened to lose what they already have by accepting and opening the door to accepting the removal of some service. And I think that’s the worry. And I get it. I understand that worry. I genuinely, genuinely do. So we need to make sure that if we’re doing it, we’re doing it from a very person-centred point of view, which is about saying, is this the right solution? if it happens to be a cheaper solution, excellent. But the first question should always be, this the right solution? And I have screeds of casework from disabled people whose needs-based assessment is almost entirely based on funding and finance. And that’s why people are worried about it, I think.

Jimmy Black

And just as a side issue, an important side issue, the change from analog to digital telephone lines. So many community care alarms are based on the old analog standard. Do you think that there’s an urgency, sufficient urgency at local authority level to deal with this?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

That’s a good point. I hadn’t actually, to be honest, it’s not one I thought about in detail, but I had noticed that one phone company, I don’t even know if I’m allowed to mention it, BT have announced recently a sort of series of what I would call road shows going around different areas to talk to their customers or to talk to our constituents. So they’ve asked us for our help to promote that, which I’ve done, where constituents or customers, whatever perspective you’re coming from, can go and talk to BT about that. Whether or not, I hadn’t thought about the community alarm, so I’ve got contact there where I may in fact ask them that question. And I would imagine that there’ll be a number of my constituents and possibly therefore their customers that will go along to these events. There’s one in Glasgow, I can’t remember the date, but it’s early August, where people can go and ask questions of that process. So this may indeed welcome up. But I will raise it anyway, because it’s a really good question. I hadn’t thought about it.

Kieran Findlay

In September, Horizon Housing, Scottish Housing News, with support from Campion Homes, will be hosting the Housing and Social Care Accessibility Summit. You yourself are chairing a session called Making Financial Sense, Accessible Design Can Save the Public Purse. Where are some of the areas in that public purse that can benefit from these savings?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

So I think there’s a whole host of different things that we could do, but it’s, I suppose, and this is, it sounds a bit cliché, but I’m old enough to remember the Campbell Christie report that really hammered this home. Prevention really is important. And if we can build houses in the first place that are more accessible, even just if we stick to 10%, then we’re not going to have the same problems that we’ve had for decades in the past, which are costing us a lot of money to adapt. So that in itself will be a saving. It’s not a simple saving immediately. I would say this is more an economic argument than it is an accounting argument because I think it’s slightly more longer term.

If you get an accessible house then people can get in and out of it. They’re more likely to, their mental health and wellbeing’s got to be a lot better than it would be if they couldn’t get out of it. If you’ve got a house that’s accessible that means someone can have a shower for example, that would be transformative. Also would have an implication on health and social care presumably. So all of these things will help us deal with some of the demographic challenges as well as the economic challenges that we face in the future.

But it isn’t a simple spreadsheet where you move money around from one bit to the next to save and cost in each area. I don’t think it’s that simple. I think it’s a much, much longer-term strategy and vision that’s required. That’s not what we’re seeing from this government actually in many areas. But in health and social care and housing, this is particularly acute. So I don’t think it’s a quick fix. I don’t think it’s a case of me saying to you right now, move that money from that pot to put it into there to spend it on that.

What I am saying though is, let’s do things properly in the future, let’s not make the same mistakes in the past, let’s make information available so people can understand on a national basis where they can live and what options they’ve got. Let’s make sure that if we’re building anything in the future, we’re not making the same mistakes in the past and costing our future generation money for adaptions. We’re never going to get rid of the need for that at all. Of course, we won’t because bespoke housing is going to be required per person. So accessible house for me will still need something done, probably, but we can reduce the cost.

We need to be making support in affordable housing supply across tenures, incidentally. So this includes the private sector as well as the public and the registered social landlord sectors. In terms of buying and renting, we need to do as much as we can in the planning stages to make sure that things are done quickly. A lot of the adaptations, it’s not just about the money that the problem is, it’s also about the planning permission because of the delays to that. So we need to be really, we need to get far, far slicker with that.

We also need to look at what requirements we place through planning for accessible homes to make more homes accessible in the future. So there’s a lot we can do, but it’s not a case of shift it from that resource into that resource immediately and overnight. I think it’s an economic rather than an accounting argument.

Kieran Findlay

Final question then. You’ve already said many times that it’s very important that people with accessibility requirements are involved in these discussions but how can you ensure that they are given a chance to influence the people that are building the homes, the housing associations, the councils, other landlords and so on?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

Yeah that’s a really good point because housing needs and demand assessments are supposed to be done in consultation with the local community and often disabled people’s voices can get drowned out so I would hope that local authorities can always speak for my own in Glasgow are doing as much as they possibly can to reach out in the development of those so that they understand what is the need in the future in my particular area in terms of demand. But then you’ve got the builders and the developers as well, private and registered social. I’ve seen some really good examples where developers and private social landlords as well as private rented and developers have all reached out. So there is good examples of it, but I don’t think it’s done in a systemic routine way.

That’s something that should be strengthened so that disabled people can be involved in it because no one has a monopoly on wisdom. And we spoke a minute ago about people’s expectations of their councillors and of their MSPs. And yes, we do have that kind of sort helicopter view of all the different services in a way that I can’t find anyone else that does either. I would agree with you. It does appear to kind of buck stops right up. And then you have to get people to talk to one another. But also, no one disabled person has a solution to all of this. And a lot of disabled people don’t necessarily understand what the issues with the landlords are or developers are.

And I’ve had meetings recently with registered social landlords doing some excellent work. And I’d be asking basic questions, well, if you’re not meeting the standard, why? And then they’ll come back and explain some of the planning issues, some of the funding issues, some of the fact that it’s not easy just to allocate a house to somebody so that you can maybe say that should have, as an example, wooden flooring or like lino flooring as opposed to carpet from build so that there’s going to be a wheelchair user in it and it would be easier that would be their preference.

Because when you start the build you could be looking at three years out and you can’t really allocate a house on you get you know if someone needs an accessible house you can’t really say to them ‘you have this house but it’s going to be three years’ and although that to be honest is actually some of the waiting times so it’s very complicated and no one person has a solution to that and I don’t registered social landlords don’t.

But if we don’t talk to each other, we’re certainly not going to find it. So I think we need to do as much of this as possible through co-production so that we can try and find the solutions to some of the real problems that we have.

Jimmy Black

Pam, I wish we could get to the point where we do provide flooring in all the new build houses that we produce because quite often it’s the floorboards and then people are left to get on with whatever it is they can find to put down in those floors. So yeah, that’s an interesting point you make about people with, let’s say if you’re a wheelchair user, a carpet is going to be harder to get about on, isn’t it, than a laminate or a lino floor?

Pam Duncan-Glancy

Yeah, I mean, for some people it’s just, it’s easier. That was, I’m using it only as an example to say that for, know, I, one of the things I was saying was, I’ve got casework where the person moved in sort of off plan, if you like, but there were carpets and they were like, why did, you know, what’s happened here? Like why was I not able to request that that wasn’t put in? This has been built, there’s no one else in it. It’s only me straight into it. So how come there’s still a problem?

And I was like, yeah, that’s a question. How come there is still a problem? So I went to the landlords and the developers and they said, because actually by the time you develop the house and get it sorted and finally build it and then you do the stage one, stage two, stage three sort of adaptations or the stage that you build, there’s a whole host. So you’ve got about a five-year process from planning permission to people moving in. How do you shorten that to make it like this person needs to move into that property, therefore we save money upfront by building it in a better way for that person? How do you get the sweet spot?

So the flooring was just an example that I was using that it’s much more expensive to rip out the carpets and re-put in the new flooring. So do you know what I mean? So it’s an example. How do we get that sweet spot? It goes back to your point actually earlier which is how bespoke can you be? And I think the only way we answer some of these really tricky questions, wicked problems if you might say, is to put disabled people in the room with the decision-makers and the developers and try and find a solution to some of it. There won’t be a perfect solution. There never will be. But we can get better than we’ve got.

Jimmy Black

Kieran, I know that Pams made a couple of critical comments about the Scottish Government but we’ll be having Paul McLennan as a speaker at the Horizon Scottish News Campion Summit in September so I’m sure he’ll take his chance to reply.

Kieran Findlay

And as well as developers have signed up, social landlords have signed up so it really promises to be one of these discussions that you’ve mentioned that it needs to take place, everyone in the room, and try and come up with solutions.

If you would like to join everyone I’ve mentioned there, then those tickets are still available. I’ll put a link to the Eventbrite page in the show notes to this. I’ll also put a link to Euan’s guide and the Christie report, things that you mentioned there as well. Thanks again for coming on to the podcast. I’m Kieran Findlay and thanks always to Jimmy Black. We’ll be back with another episode on accessible housing in a couple of weeks.

Tickets for the Housing & Social Care Accessibility Summit are available here.