Motabilty- More Fraud for Disabled

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* There was a great fanfare in November last year when David Ennals, Minister of Social Services, announced a new scheme for disabled drivers-Motability.

Coupled with the announcement that the mobility allowance was going up from f7 to £10 next November it was described as la new deal for the disabled.

To show what a wonderful scheme it was, a long list of sponsors was announced in which Len Murray rubbed shoulders with Baron Evelyn de Rothschild, and Moss Evans backed up Lord Goodman.

Exalted The idea behind the scheme-which has not yet started apart from showing the exalted circles trade union leaders move in-was that disabled drivers would hand over their £10 a week and the Motability would arrange that they would get an adapted car.

No-one has explained how £10 a week is going to be lanywhere near enough to meet the cost of buying and running a car-even with the discounts that Motability will win from manufacturers and the £100 million it has borrowed at rock. bottom interest, from the clearing banks.

Since the payments are ¡taxable many disabled people will receive far less than £10.

Victims

Once again in a history of , deception, lies and evasions that stretches back ten years, the disabled have been made public relations victims.

The Lib-Lab coalitionwith its dedication to public spending cuts-is not of course interested in a solution to the problem of disabled people trapped in the homerather it is interested in solving the problem of the continual attacks that have been made on Government Ministers and DHSS officials.

The attacks have surrounded the three wheeled vehicle which has been given to the disabled-the notorious "trike'.

The trike evolved from ¡bath chairs supplied to war pensioners by the British Red Cross Society.

It was covered in, given an engine and gradually evolved to the point where the latest trikes have a 500cc engine and are capuble of speeds of up to 60 mph.

The result is a vehicle with an injury accident record four times worse than adapted cars for. the disabled. The trikes are not as safe as cars in winds, they are made of fibre glass and give little protection in a crash, they are noisy, uncomfortable and, because they can carry only the disable person alone, they increase the isolation of the disabled.

All this has been known for a long time. In 1969, Which magazine came out with its first report attacking the trikes and since then there have been a whole succession of reports and tests almost all of which have condemned the trike.

A government inquiryheaded by Baroness Sharp recommended they be The trike-a motorised bath chair Ennals replaced with cars: It took the government a year to publish that report, the findings were so unwelcome.

In the early 70s when the crash and death figures were being splashed over the papers, when Graham Hill, the racing driver, was leading a campaign against the trikes, the Tory government and later, Labour, was under extreme pressure.

Suppressed

Ministers were constantly making reassuring noises in Parliament about the trikes' safety record.

In 1973 the Department of Health and Social Security asked the test body MIRA to test the trike. Again the results were suppressed.

At this time opposition to the trikes was coming from all over the country. One of the leaders was himself disabled, Peter MacBryan.

He has been a consistent opponent of the trike-fighting for it to be replaced by an adapted car.

Politically MacBryan is not at all conscious. He has been happy to see allies among Tories and has not turned his campaign towards the trade union movement.

But within his limitations he extremely has fought hard.

In December 1973 he received a phone call which seemed to confirm every suspicion about the answers being given in the House of Commons.

The conversation was brief and to the point. The caller said he had a copy of an internal memorandum sent Parliamentary Under Secretary to a Department of Health and Social Security official, confirming that a Evans government cover-up was progress over the safety of the trike.

A few days later a photo copy arrived. It was on Department notepaper, dated 1 November 1973 and contained the following damning statement:

"Even if in due course public opinion does force us to reconsider the vehicle specifications, it would not at this stage be politic to create suspicion that we are in any way hesitant, or uncommitted to our adopted stance on their safety"

Pm the Joins Parliame Iniler Secretory of Sti Mx. SE Mortis matter in the normal way.

MacBryan was delighted. He had, he believed, achieved the final piece of evidence he needed to show that the government and the DHSS had been covering up the truth about the disastrous trikes.

The letter was dated five days before Alison answered questions about its safety in the Commons.

In his reply Alison implied that a petrol tank on the trike met government regulations.

In fact the Motor Industry Research Association testwhich the leaked memo said should not be mentionedhad caused a fracture in the tank in a 30 mph head on collision.

But Alison denied that he had ever written the memo and when Sir Alan Marre, the Ombudsman came to report on the trikes in August 1975, he said that there was absolutely no reason to suppose that Alison was not telling the truth.

MacBryan has subsequently been threatened with legal action for persisting in saying that the memo was authentic and that there has been a It would be libellous to suppose anything other than that the memo was a forgery. But it was a very clever one.

It was written on Department paper, apparently duplicated on a machine similar to that used in the DHSS, signed with initials similar to those Alison used at the start of his name (but not, he says, in the fashion that he uses on memos).

The officer to whom /it was addressed was said to Nov 1973 MICHAEL ALISON MICHAEL ALISOI disputed have left the Department before the memo was sent.

However, the same Ombudsman report found that the statement to which the memo apparently referred, was indeed misleading and that Alison had been given wrong information.

Common language would go further and say that whoever was responsible for producing the information lied.

Overturned

A petrol tank that ruptures in a test cannot be said to have met regulations which say it should be safely affixed.

The Ombudsman also discovered that repeated denials in the Commons that a trike had overturned during the MIRA tests were only half true.

(It had not overturned during the test but it had done so while being backed into a parking place while the tests were going on!)

The Ombudsman was lenient on the DHSS, commenting merely that they were open to the charge of the Department had been "slow to act"

Spot checks on disabled drivers when pressure on the Department was at its height was described as unfortunately timed.

Disabled drivers said

intimidation.

Complicated

The situation-particularly the mildness of Marre's criticism-is further complicated by the fact that the Ombudsman was himself Under Secretary in the DHSS in the period shortly beforé that he was investigating.

A complete condemnation of DHSS policy on the trike would certainly have reflected to some extent on his own period in the department.

It was probably the nearest the disabled came to success. From that time to this the Tory government and later the Labour and Lib-Lab governments have done their best to retrieve some credibility.

Labour's criticisms vanished almost overnight after the 1974 election victory.

Allowance

The master stroke came in 1976 when David Ennals announced the phasing out of the trike.

Ennals also announced that he was replacing the trike with-nothing. Instead the disabled were to get a disability allowance-first of £S, which has risen now to £7 and next November to £10.

Because this allowance goes to all disabled it was a major gain for those without cars. For those who would have had trikes it is a disaster. . Faced with the choice between a dangerous vehicle and this allowance the disabled pressure groups split and began to turn against themselves.

MacBryan became transformed from a hero into a villain because he was blamed for the decision to phase out the trikes.

Now under cover of a 'Save our Trikes' backlash the trikes are still being issued as replacement vehicles to those who already have them.

The Motability announcement is simply the latest in this series of manoeuvres to put some window dressing on the deal.

Campaign

MacBryan is now at the end of a blind alley insisting that everyone involved be charged with criminal negligence for continuing to supply trikes or for taking part in a cover-up.

There are undoubtedly secrets inside the DHSS that would clear up some of the mysteries of the history of the trikes.

But the only way forward for the disabled is to turn from appeals for prosecutions to a determined campaign inside the trade union movement-particularly in the car factories.

The technology exists for the disabled to have adapted cars in which they will not only be safer, but will also be able to take passengers.

Moral outrage at the latest government moves . will produce nothing for the disabled. Ten years of outrage have proved precisely that.

Disassociate

The campaign must begin with a demand that Len Murray and Moss Evans disassociate themselves from a scheme which is being used to give some credibility to a policy which has left thousands of disabled people virtually housebound, and fight for a job-creating programme to provide adapted cars for all disabled people.

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A major stumbling block for any leftwardmoving elements opposing the coalitionist leadership of the Labour Party remains the The refusal of Labour's "left wing" MPs to fight against the current 10% pay limits arbitrarily imposed by Chancellor Healey and the Lib-Lab coalition government came out clearly during the firemen's strike.

Throughout the nine weeks not a single 'left' MP went beyond vague expres sions of 'solidarity' and talk of the firemen as a "special case"

Such opportunist positions deliberately evade the fight against wage control for the whole working class.

And they consciously shrink from calls to action that might lead workers to force the 'lefts' themselves into the front line of a real fight tc break the Lib-Lab coalition and oust the Callaghan-Healey leadership.

But the 'lefts' impotence is not restricted to Phase 3.

Already they are preparing to duck out of any struggle against government plans for a Phase Four.

This was shown last Tuesday in question time at LEWIS: INFILThATa the House of Commons.

One-time darling of ti 'left' Michael Foot approp1 ately stood in for Callaghan.

Endorsed

But instead of meeting a barrage of bitter opposition from enraged left wing MPs opposing any hint of a Phase 4, he found it easy to parry the damp flannels thrown by Eric Heffer and Dennis Skinner.

Heffer pompously "warned" that whatever and other claims be exaggerated and built on fantasy"

Clearly the picture conveyed is one of a group of babblers who are dismissed as no possible threat to the figure the Lib-Lab gore ment has in mind it did 1 have the backing of Labour Party as a whole.

But Heffer knows as • as anyone that the wishes the Labour Party never er into the calculations of Callaghan-Healey leadershi And he knows too tha! long as the reactionary a ition deal with the Libe remains intact, the Lib leaders will continue to b more say on governm policy than any labour me ment body.

Heffer himself has tac endorsed this position trooping into the lobbie! vote support for the l Lab coalition for the ten months, and clearly no intention of calling any fight to break the Lab deal.

PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report

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HPJ 474N PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report