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AN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION has called for disabled consumers to be ‘bold and loud’ in exercising their spending power.
The UK-based Extra Costs Commission (ECC), launched by Disability charity Scope, has today published its findings into the expenses paid out by disabled people.
It was found that, on average, disabled people pay out around £550 (€774) more a month when compared to an able bodied person.
In the United Kingdom, the average rate of extra-cost payments received by disabled people comes in at around £360 (€506).
Situation at home
In Ireland there also exists a disparity between what disabled people receive and how much they require to cover costs.
On this issue, the Disability Federation of Ireland (DFI) has called for people with disabilities to be given an additional €20 a week as part of a range of efforts to tackle the issue.
Speaking about this, the group’s CEO, John Dolan, said, “There are extra costs associated with having a disability, such as transport, heating, special diets and prescription charges in addition to the specialist supports that people require, which may cost more because the market for such goods is small.”
It calculates that the extra cost of living with disability in Ireland comes in at between €10,764 and €14,352.
What should be done?
Moving forward the ECC has suggested a number of actions for disabled people to take to ensure they are in the strongest market position.
It points out that in the UK disabled people have a collective annual spend of around £212 billion (€298 billion), something that has been described as ‘the purple pound’. It outlines steps that can be taken to increase the influence of disabled people in the market.
Included in this is the use of online forums for the discussion and rating of shopping experience, creating greater datasets of spending by disabled people to encourage retailers to factor in the purple pound into their marketing and target disabled consumers and, improving website accessibility for disabled users.
The new ECC survey has also found that three-quarters of disabled people have had to leave a shop or business because of poor customer service or lack of disability awareness.
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People can be very precious sometimes
Like the last few articles on the EAT, they have no power, and take boths sides versions with equal credibility (i.e the employee and company can say anything unsubstantiated and it is taken as fact by the (usually ex-union) guy in the chair position). The employer is entitled now to go to a real court, and see if the unfair dismissal is valid, where by the employee not turning up for dismissal meetings and the company following due process will be taken into account. They have to with this against writing off work €7k.
It should be easier for employees to go to proper legal entity to weigh up the facts of a case. Too often, the EAT “judges” in favour of the employee, only for it to be overturned in court. This is unfair to both the employee and the company, and the only purpose is to make the hundreds of “quasi-judicial” chairs feel a bit of power for the day.
Rather than being chaired by impartial people, it has a mix of pro-employee and pro-employer people. If your case is heard by one or the other, the outcome is decided by the prejudices of the person presiding on the day, rather than the facts of the case.
If the parties have enough funds, the cases are nearly always appealing to the courts.
The tribunals are a waste of time and money, but you must go through them to get access to the court
I agree… It can go either way. In observations, all the reported cases are chaired by the pro-union adjudicators, but that is the ones where employees get the award (which tempts other employees to constructively get dismissed and take a case on the basis that there is a template for getting sacked and over 50% chance of getting a reward). This may be related to the non movable position of Kieran Mulvey in managing this charade.
It also hides the cases where competent employees are genuinely bullied and harassed in work, and lose their case due to an opinion of a pro-employer chair. The whole system is a joke, and it’s history was just to remove cases from courts, and give unelected union and IBEC guys a bit of power.
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