Report on Disability Community Involvement Event, 21st February 2008

North Lanarkshire Council published its first Disability Equality Scheme in December 2006. The publication came after 6 months of intensive activity that saw the council and disabled people working together to set the priorities for the scheme and action plan and ensure that the priorities were the right ones.

Part of this intensive process included the setting up of a Stakeholder group, a community involvement event and a questionnaire.

Since the scheme was published much work has been undertaken to ensure we are on target to achieve what we said we would do within the action plan. In order to track progress the stakeholder group, initially set up to assist with the development of the scheme, evolved into a Monitoring and Review Group. A disability equality officers group also exists to ensure progress is made and reports to the Corporate Equalities Working Group and the Monitoring and Review Group.

At its first community involvement event in September 2006 the council made a commitment that it would report back to a community event on a yearly basis. This event would feedback on what progress had been made in achieving it's stated actions and would also ensure the priorities for the coming year were the right ones and if not this would give people a chance to say and influence what they should be.

The commitment to hold an annual community event is also stated within the Terms of Reference of the DES Monitoring and Review Group.

Part of the Disability Equality Duty says that we must involve disabled people in order to make our services responsive to disabled people's needs. To be able to do this the council produced a strategy paper 'how we intend to mainstream involvement ' that details the opportunities for involvement at many different levels of activity. We also want to know what the barriers are to people becoming involved.

The community involvement event would therefore be twofold:

• Give a progress report on what has been achieved in the first year and review the priorities and actions as contained within the Disability Equality Scheme Action Plan
• Present the paper on 'how we intend to mainstream involvement' and discuss issues of barriers to involvement

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