I was delighted to read in last week’s Gazette about the installation of a Changing Places facility at Intu Lakeside shopping centre. This is a massive step forward for our iconic and much-visited mall at the west end of the borough.
The new fully accessible toilet facility offers an adult-sized changing bench and room for up to two carers as well as an adjustable sink and hoist. Visitors with a variety of special needs and disabilities can now use discreet services with increasing confidence and comfort.
The CP website states - the Changing Places Consortium launched its campaign in 2006 on behalf of the over 1/4 of a million people who cannot use standard accessible toilets. This includes people with profound and multiple learning disabilities, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, as well as older people. This year they installed their 1000thfacility in Nottinghamshire!
This good news follows the bad news that the UN committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has severely criticised the UK government for not fulfilling its commitments signed up to in a convention of 2007. The Guardian said “(the UN) is scathing of the UK government’s inconsistent and patchy approach to protecting disability rights and its failure to audit the impact of its austerity policies on disabled people.”
When a nation fails to include and protect its most vulnerable citizens it loses its moral integrity and turns from the path of goodness and kindness. As a society and as individuals within that society, it is incumbent upon us to do all we can to reach out to the most needy and speak out for those with no voice.
Thousands of years ago the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”
Take my word for it – if we do this, we will be blessed!
