Disability equality plan: part 1 - easy read

What we will do

1. The quality of our work and leadership

We will:

• put money into making the lives of disabled people better
• collect together work that the Scottish Government is already doing

We will focus on good leadership and ways to check that all organisations are doing the right things for disabled people.

2. Working together

We will find more ways to work with disabled people, to:

• find out what their lives are like
• make new ideas together

We believe in the saying ‘nothing about us without us’.

This means that no decisions about disabled people’s lives should happen without their views.

We will work closely with DPOs to help us do this and they will check our work.

Actions – what we will do in the first phase

1. We will make it easier for DPOs to ask for money from the Scottish Government.

2. We will make it easier for DPOs to ask for money from other places.

We will work with the Scottish Funders Forum on this.

The Scottish Funders Forum is a group of organisations who give money to DPOs and other charities.

3. We will make a plan for any big problems that might happen in Scotland in the future, like:

• an illness like Covid-19
• floods

If these problems happen, we want our plan to work well for disabled people.

4. The things we plan will be good for the environment.

We want Scotland and the world to be clean and safe for everyone.

5. We will make plans for winter.

Winter can be difficult for disabled people because of:

• illnesses like colds and flu
• bad weather
• the cost of heating homes

6. We will talk to disabled people in Scotland who:

• live in the countryside, far from big towns and cities
• live on islands

We want disabled people in these places to tell us what they need.

3. Being better at understanding how decisions affect disabled people

Understanding how decisions affect disabled people is called disability competence.

Good understanding means that disabled people feel empowered and protected by policies.

Actions

7. We will work on a new disability competence learning plan to help the whole of the Scottish Government understand:

• the social model of disability better
• how to support disabled people better

We will do better work by:

• working with our DPO partners
• listening to what disabled people have experienced
• following the social model of disability

8. Every year we will have a Disabled People’s Cabinet takeover.

The Cabinet is the group of Government Ministers who make decisions about what work the Government will do.

A Cabinet takeover means disabled people and their organisations can run a Cabinet meeting.

They can speak directly to Government Ministers about the problems they have.

Please now read Part 2.