Logo: The Rainbow Ripples Report

Good Practice Recommendations - Government & Service Providers

  1. Shifts in policy to broad equality and diversity statements and combined service provision, and away from specialist, separate policies and services for race, disability, sexual orientation, gender and so on, must be carefully managed. It must be ensured that the necessary expertise of staff is not lost, and that service providers can still deal with the range of issues that are currently addressed. This said, it must also be ensured that the benefits of staff’s potential expertise on more than one social issue, and the awareness that people fit into more than one social category, must be fully appreciated.
  2. There needs to be greater monitoring of LGB and disability amongst service providers and employers. Clients and staff of service providers need to be monitored in relation to disability and sexual orientation so that a better understanding of the scale of the barriers that people face and the range of people’s needs is understood. In order to achieve this, sometimes it may be necessary to monitor in relation to type of disabling barrier that the person faces, e.g. whether they are a Deaf person, a blind person, have a learning difficulty, a physical impairment or experience mental distress.
  3. Service providers need to be aware that they may have LGB disabled service users or customers. They must not make assumptions about people’s sexual orientation or disability status if none has been declared.
  4. There is a need to ensure that Disability Equality Schemes and impact assessments cover LGB issues.
  5. There is a need for services working in different areas of people’s lives to communicate with one another. Failure of services to work together, to share expertise and to combine their resources mean that they are failing to meet LGB disabled and other people’s needs could remove 2nd sentence as it is an explanation, not a recommendation.
  6. Research is needed in to the development of Charter Mark schemes to indicate the quality of services for LGB and disabled people. It is suggested that basic standards could be self assessed by organisations which could then be advertised to potential service users or customers to inform them of their friendly and accessible nature. Higher levels of accessibility and specialism of service for LGB and disabled people would be assessed by external auditors. The exact nature of the criteria which would have to be met for each level of recognition needs to be considered in the near future.
  7. When considering changes to benefits regulations and other legislation, the particular needs of LGB disabled people need to be considered. For example, the Disability Living Allowance’s mobility component does not currently recognize the wide variation in disabled people’s transport needs and, hence costs. It is as yet unknown what the implications of changes to means-tested benefits arising from the Civil Partnerships legislation has been on LGB disabled people who are living with another person, who may or may not be their partner.

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