DISABLED LONDONERS
Around one in five Londoners is disabled. This city was built for the other four, and the Mayoralty has too often treated accessibility as a transport engineering question rather than a question of whether a person can participate in the life of their own city.
9.1 Movement
- An accelerated programme of step-free access at every Tube station, with the least accessible boroughs prioritised first.Deep-level Victorian stations are genuinely difficult and expensive. Prioritisation by borough accessibility rather than by passenger volume is a deliberate change of approach. Indicative capital: two hundred million pounds within the term.
- Every bus route, taxi rank and interchange audited for accessibility within the first year, with results published in full.Indicative cost: two million pounds.
- The Freedom Pass and Taxicard protected in full for the duration of the term.Indicative cost: provisionally three hundred and fifty million pounds annually.
9.2 Voice and participation
- Disabled Londoners represented on every mayoral advisory body, and paid for their time.Unpaid participation excludes precisely the people whose participation is most needed. Indicative cost: half a million pounds annually.
- Accessible housing quotas enforced in the London Plan and on all mayoral development land.Policy instrument, no direct cost.
- An end to the employment gap for disabled Londoners, with the GLA group setting the standard as an employer.Direct within the GLA group. Argued for across London’s employers.
- Immediate exemption for disabled passengers and their carers from every airport drop-off charge in London.Charges are set commercially by privately owned operators. This is the point at which the current charging regime is most vulnerable, and it is where the argument starts.