TRANSCRIPT

The Green Alliance Podcast | Why inclusive policy matters: an interview with Emma Vogelmann, Transport For All

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

disabled, organisations, disability, policy, transport, experience, work, barriers, alliance, policymaking, people, podcast, community, recognised, research, involve, guess, developing, completely, reflected

SPEAKERS

Emma Vogelmann, Sophie O’Connell

 

Sophie O’Connell 

Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We’re the charity and think tank that’s all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment. I’m Sophie, policy advisor at Green Alliance. In this episode I speak with Emma Vogelmann from the organisation Transport For All. We discuss how and why policymakers need to be more inclusive of the public, marginalised communities and communities that have not typically been sought out for engagement in policies and implementation processes. Welcome Emma, thanks so much for joining me.

Emma Vogelmann 

No, thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Sophie O’Connell 

Can you give me a bit of an overview of your work at Transport For All and a summary of the organisation?

Emma Vogelmann 

Yeah absolutely. So Transport For All is a disabled persons organisation. So what that means is that the majority of our staff team and our board of trustees are disabled or have some sort of lived experience of disability. We are celebrating our 40th year this year. We have been primarily a campaigning organisation, campaigning for the rights of disabled people on all major transports. We cover everything from public transport all the way through to private car use, aviation, whatever that might be as well as walking, wheeling around your local neighbourhood, for example. So my work at Transport For All – I’m the Policy, Public Affairs and Research Manager. So what that means is that I make sure that the experiences of disabled people are heard and completely reflected in the policy recommendations that I would put to, whether that’s local government, national government, individual companies, whoever that might be to make sure that disabled people are reflected in those policy recommendations so that any changes that are made that are going to affect disabled people are considering disabled people.

Sophie O’Connell 

So talking about the importance of bringing people into the policymaking process, I guess you’re doing that in the policy recommendations that you put forward. But what would you say are the most important reasons for other think tanks and NGOs to involve people in policymaking?

Emma Vogelmann 

I think when you’re developing policy that’s going to affect people, you need to consult with those people that are going to be impacted. Otherwise, you will run into all sorts of problems that you didn’t know were going to occur and then could make the policy less effective. And with disabled people, we see that show often that disabled people aren’t brought in to considerations early enough so that when decisions are made, it’s much harder to sort of retrofit them to meet the needs and experiences of disabled people because they are too far down the line. So it’s really important to involve communities, like disabled people from the outset, policy considerations or any type of discussion about potentially changing policy, because it’s just so much more time effective

Sophie O’Connell 

When I spoke to your colleague, he said that it’s not enough to just involve disabled people in the policymaking process by having a kind of checklist of things that you need to look out for as lots of different disabilities needs will conflict with another’s and particularly around transport. That seems to be a big issue. And other challenges. I guess, for organisations like Green Alliance to change  the way it works would be that involving people in the policymaking process is really time intensive. So it can take a lot of time to build up the processes to be able to bring people in, but also forging meaningful relationships with organisations that work directly with a certain community. But what do you think some of the benefits are to organisations that do that? So you’ve already mentioned the time kind of constraints, and it is important to bring people in early, but what are the benefits? Could you foresee if Green Alliance was to do this?

Emma Vogelmann 

Yeah I think it’s just going to create much more effective policy to be really honest, I think that when you mentioned there about involving disabled people in a way that’s not sort of just a tick box exercise, that’s crucial because, you know, even myself as a disabled person working in disability related policy, I’m learning every single day about the way that different disabled people will experience any mode of public transport, and you need to be reflecting the experiences of the people using the service or you know, whatever it is that you’re looking to potentially change through policy. And there are things that you will never consider it that will be a huge barrier to an individual. And if you can create policy that reflects that experience and removes those barriers, then that shows how important I think the benefits are that if you create policy, or anything, to be really honest, whether it’s a product or a service, whatever it might be, when you include disabled people in that, I mean, there’s so many benefits, but there are over 14 million disabled people in the UK. And when you think about disability, it’s the only marginalised group that anyone can join at any time, whether that’s through old age or an injury, whatever that might be. And so you’re designing for your future self, when you think about it. And if you are creating policy with disabled people, then you’re going to be covering your elderly parent or yourself if something were to happen to you. So really, it just makes so much sense to include disabled people as a huge, huge section of the community. I think, in terms of your point around it being a bit more time intensive, I would say that that is somewhat true. I will say that I think that there are really effective ways to involve disabled people that when you do it right, and when you do it in an informed and considerate way, it’s completely time well spent. Because you will make much more effective policy than you would if you didn’t consider the needs and experiences of disabled people early on.

Sophie O’Connell 

And like you said, you’re learning every day from this job. So it’s definitely room for other organisations to learn as well and strengthen the policy outcomes. So aside from Transport For All’s membership community, how else do you engage directly and connect with the disabled community? As like you said, it’s such a varied community and growing, I guess.

Emma Vogelmann 

Yeah absolutely. Sure. I mean, we have a really amazing membership base, which you mentioned, yeah, over 900 disabled people across the UK that we engage with, but we also really tap into other organisations, communities, we’ve built a lot of very strong relationships with local disability organisations or other organisations that may be condition specific if we’re looking to get a really well rounded experience of disability. So that’s a really great way to make sure that you’re engaging with the right types of people who support their relationships and use a trusted voice in the disabled community because I think disabled people are so used to being asked for their opinions or their life experiences, and have it not really be acted on and to sort of regurgitate some really difficult experiences but not also be recognised by that, you know. So at Transport For All, we always renumerate disabled people for their contribution and their time and their expertise just like we would any other consultant, right? If you think about if you’re building a website, you wouldn’t bring on a website developer and not pay them for their expertise. It’s exactly the same with disability. So I think by using the established voices in the disabled, organisations, Iike Transport For All or wherever else it might be, disabled people know that we will only take on projects that we have a good reason to believe that their views are going to matter that they’re going to shape whatever it is that’s been developed and that they’re going to be recognised as experts, which they absolutely are.

Sophie O’Connell 

Them sharing their expertise is really important to kind of hit home and make sure that people are valued for that. How is Transport For All working with think tanks and NGOs like Green Alliance in their policymaking works and other organisations’ policymaking work.

Emma Vogelmann 

It’s a really interesting part of our work because we get to work with a huge range of organisations so there’s really two strands of the work that we do at Transport For All. We have an amazing consulting and training, that side of our work, where we will be brought in to deliver disability equality training, and we will give expert insight into the lived experience of disability and the social model of disability to educate decision makers, policymakers, whoever it might be on disability and how disabled people people are impacted by barriers every single day and making sure that they’re informed on that. So then their policy can then hopefully remove some of those barriers that disabled people face. That’s one really great way that we sort of work with other organisations. We will also sometimes be brought on research projects as a partner where we can lend our expertise to developing research proposals or research materials that will go out to disabled people and make sure that they’re accessible, because so often research is being conducted that isn’t accessible to a huge range of disabled people, whether that basic things like not using plain English, when you’re writing research questions, for example, or if you’re using an online platform that is actually completely incompatible with a screen reader. So those are just examples of things that we can point out to research partners or any partner that we work with, to make sure that they’re sending things out in a way that disabled people can be included. We will also conduct research ourselves. So whether that is through focus groups, which I do.  A lot of we pull from our membership, as well as you know, other sections of disabled community to get a really diverse range of disabled voices and really go into specific topics and tease out what are their experiences.  Also, crucially, what do they think would improve the experience because I’m forever saying that disabled people are the best problem solvers and the best creative thinkers, because every day, we’re presented with barriers that we have to figure out how to remove because we have no choice. So asking disabled people, what they think will improve their experience can often be a really valuable tool in developing policy. So we will do things like we can run interviews, we can run surveys, we can really get a great range of disabled people involved in conversations and really allow people developing policy to see how their ideas will impact this huge section of the community and make sure that they’re not creating more barriers that disabled people will have to figure out a way to mitigate or, you know, just making sure that things are as effective as possible from the outset,.

Sophie O’Connell 

You said a lot in there that there’s kind of basic things that organisations should already be doing to make sure that all their external work is accessible. That seems like a no brainer, but obviously, isn’t kind of the default for a lot of organisations. But the training and consultancy work you do seems really great as I guess that would have a legacy through kind of the workforce, rather than involving disabled people into one piece of policy research and that goes out, but the legacy of that doesn’t live on, I guess, with the staff. What are three key takeaways that you’d like listeners from this podcast to take away with them from the discussion about involving disabled people in policymaking?

Emma Vogelmann 

I think the first is to recognise disabled people as experts. So often, disabled people give their experiences, and they’re not often asked what do they think would improve a situation and that is really a missed opportunity so I  really encourage people to consider disabled people, experts, and to renumrate them accordingly, because disabled people do far too much for free. It’s absolutely not something that we would ever ask disabled people to do at Transport For All,. So that would be one major takeaway, I think. The second is to remember that the sooner you bring disabled people or organisations like Transport For All into ideas and discussions around any sort of decision, whether that’s policy or service development, whatever it is, the sooner you bring us in the better because it’s so much harder to retrofit accessibility into an idea than to build it from the beginning. And it’s so easy to get it right. If you just work with disabled people,  the sooner the better, and the more time effective everything will be. I think the third is to really want people to think about the range of barriers that disabled people experience and to think about how anything that they do could exacerbate one of those barriers. So barriers will be really obvious ones like, you know, physical barriers if there is or isn’t a lift, for example. But there are also attitudinal barriers that will be people’s opinions on disabled people. So whether that’s the assumption that a disabled candidate isn’t the right fit for the job, because you have these assumptions about their productivity or whatever it might be there, it’s just quite honestly completely untrue. Then there will also be digital barriers so we know that so many disabled people struggle to use the internet because websites and online services aren’t designed accessibly. So it’s just so important to think about the range of barriers that disabled people face and do what you can to be removing barriers, or at least not making them worse through the the work that you’re doing. And the only way you’re gonna know that is by bringing disabled people and the experts on disability in.

Sophie O’Connell 

Thanks so much for this conversation.

Emma Vogelmann 

It’s been my pleasure.

Sophie O’Connell 

Thanks for listening to this Green Alliance podcast. Keep checking in as we continue to bring you specialist interviews and highlights from our events here on your podcast feed. You can subscribe to the Green Alliance podcast on your favourite podcast app, and can follow us @greenallianceuk on Twitter and Instagram and the Green Alliance LinkedIn. See you next time.