 The government's national disability strategy was first announced by the Prime Minister at the general election and was supposed to be a once in a generation transformative plan. However, its release has been met with a muted response by disability charities and criticism from a Tory peer. We can take a look at the measures put forward in the document. The funding included £300 million to support children with special educational needs and disabilities, an increase in the number of accessible homes and funds to adapt older properties, introducing a UK-wide campaign to increase public awareness and understanding of disability, £1 million to recruit more disabled magistrates in England and Wales, and an audit of mainline railway stations for disabled accessibility. Work and pension secretary Therese Coffey told Sky News she was excited about the plans. So we're doing more what we can do to help with accessibility to trains, things on buses where we are putting up the audio visual announcements on every single bus. Indeed, the Department for Transport is now going to work on an app where people can contact the guard at any time. Other things like making it easier for people to get into work. We estimate about 300,000 people fall out of work through being disabled or having health conditions and we want people to be able to stay in work and progress in work. So there's aspects like that as well as access to better housing, which is just easier for people's everyday lives. So there's a whole series of commitments, over 100, and they've been informed, we've been informed by the strategy, by the people we want to try and help. Coffey there suggesting this strategy was made in consultation with the people it would affect, but disability charities have complained they were asked for little input. It also appears the government didn't deign to win over the support of high-profile conservatives with disabilities. This was Lord Shinkwin speaking about the plans. I'm really disappointed. This missed opportunity. The Prime Minister promised it would be the most ambitious and transformative discipline to plan in a generation. Unfortunately, I think an awful lot of disabled people, 14 million of them, are going to see it as a broken promise. Shinkwin also said of the strategy, it comes across to me more as a PR exercise by the government to make non-disabled people aware of the wonderful things it claims it has done or was going to do for disabled people. This is not a document that ministers can claim is owned by disabled people in consultation with government. So why is the Tory national disability strategy so much of a disappointment that even Tory peers are opposing it? I spoke earlier to Ellen Clifford. She is an organiser with Disabled People Against Cuts and author of The War on Disabled People. I think a lot of disabled people were really hoping that this strategy would have something in it to address the many, many issues that disabled people have been raising continuously for the last 10 years about how far their living standards have gone backwards since 2010. The strategy really is very much lacking in substance. It doesn't address any of the key priorities that disabled people have. So, for example, the burning issues of disability benefits, which everybody I think in the country knows there are problems with those, and also social care funding for social care and ever diminishing social care packages for disabled people. These are the key issues that disabled people are facing, and yet they barely get a passing mention in the strategy itself. There's actually a legal challenge going ahead against the strategy. So we were wondering if it was actually going to be published at all. There's actually been a long delay due to the initiation of the legal challenge by disabled campaigners, and they're taking that on the grounds that there wasn't good enough consultation on it. How could the Office for Disability issues possibly know what are the key issues for disabled people when they carried out such a poor consultation that there was a survey that was launched, and that was generally considered to be very poorly put together, very rushed. The questions weren't in any kind of understandable order, and there was also some quite offensive questions in there. So, for example, there was a question, because the survey was targeted at non-disabled people as well as disabled people. There was a question, would you be happy to have a physical relationship with a disabled person in there? So you can imagine there was quite an outcry about that, and because disabled people felt they weren't able to describe the actual barriers that they're facing, and that's because issues including disability benefits and social care weren't included in that, but they were never intended to be. The government always had in mind, I think, that we obviously got the health and social care bill going through Parliament at the moment, but also what came out last week is a health and disability green paper, and that's the thing that I think disabled people should be much more focused on and more concerned about. For me, I think that this strategy is just a distraction. And could you talk a bit about that green paper? I mean, of course, your book is about the catastrophic effect that Tory reforms to disability benefits had to disabled people. What does this green paper add to that? What direction is the government now travelling? Is it getting even worse than in those days of George Osborne, or is it just not changing as much as it should do? The direction hasn't changed, but they are trying to present it as if they're taking on board the points that have been raised. Some of the points about assessments, they're being far too many assessments, and the level of stress that causes to disabled people, points about advocacy, and also social security under COVID has been really different. They had to suspend the face-to-face assessments, which meant more being done on the basis of the extensive forms and written information that was submitted, also telephone assessments, and that's something that will save the government money and is also what disabled people want to see. So the opening chapters of the green paper very much focus on those fairly in the scheme of things minor concessions, the really worrying thing is in the final chapter, and what that talks about is making the system more affordable in the future. So it's very much hinting about more cuts to come. Sanctions get hardly any mention in the paper at all, and that's obviously again one of the key issues that disabled people have had and have been raising continuously given that they disproportionately target disabled people and discriminate against them. But what it does talk about is, as they see it, the problem of too many disabled people being put into, because employment, it's all very deliberately complicated, so you can't easily explain it in a media sound bite, but employment and support allowance, the main out-of-workability benefit got taken over by Universal Credit. So the group that you get put into, if you go through your work capability assessment, you're found basically unfit for work. You're found that you can't take part in work-related activities and search requirements that people on JSA have to do, and if they don't, then they get sanctioned. So the group, when you're safe as a disabled person, with getting your out-of-work benefit, they say there are far too many people in that group. So what they're raising is this possibility of making their eligibility criteria much harder, I think, tightening that and so trying to save money on disability benefits. When the government first introduced personal independence payment, George Osborne said it would save 20% of what was the then disability living allowance budget. What's happened since is spending's just gone up and up and up, and the Office for Budgetary Responsibility found that had they kept DLA, it would have actually saved the money. They've now overspent so much against their projected savings in this area of the benefit system. And a lot of that is because there has been a huge amount of work by disabled campaigners, public lawyers, voluntary sectoral organisations to challenge the government when they've tried to cut benefits. And because of that, what we're now seeing, of course, is this idea that judicial reform needs, judicial review needs to be reformed, which will stop us from being able to take legal challenges when they try and cut and restrict access to disability benefits. So the government is clearly very much on the same, on the same direction, on the same path as they always were. And I think that we need to be really, really worried about what's coming for us in the future. My final question is going to be about the courts and a, well, I presume a fairly rare victory for disabled activists over the government. This was on the failure to provide British sign language alongside two technical briefings on the COVID pandemic at the end of last year. Could you talk about the significance of that case? So in this case, deaf British sign language interpreters brought the case saying that it was discriminatory how key government briefings on COVID didn't have British sign language interpreters. So for Wales and Scotland, every single briefing that the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish government has done, they will have an interpreter next to the speakers as they're delivering those really important messages for the public about how to keep safe. The Cabinet Office has consistently refused to do the same for England. They said subtitles, for example, and other adjustments meant the deaf people had equal access. But that's based on a complete failure to understand the nature of sign language. So I think it's not as widely understood as perhaps it should be, but that sign language is a completely different form of language to oral written language. And so therefore deaf people whose first language is sign language find it very difficult to understand written English. So they were at a complete disadvantage through this failure by the government. So today it was a victory. The court ruled that at a couple of key briefings in September and October last year during the second wave of the pandemic, they ruled that that was discrimination. However, what they've said is that on an ongoing basis, the arrangements that the government has with the BBC, for example, on their particular channel and their programs to have interpreters, they said that's enough. So it is a victory. But also I think this is an example of how the courts are reluctant to bring in any decisions which will have an ongoing implication in how the government works.