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You and Yours - Transcript 大象传媒 Radio 4 |
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TX: 25.07.08 - Disabled Access to Air Transport PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY |
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Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 大象传媒 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. BARCLAY Now disabled air passengers will have new rights to assistance throughout the 27 EU countries from tomorrow. With the holiday season at its height new EU regulations will give anyone with reduced mobility the right to help with boarding, disembarking and catching connecting flights. And the onus will be on airport operators rather than individual airlines to help out. People will be able to expect better and more consistent support from the moment they arrive at an airport to the time when they board the plane. But how will it work in practice? Our age and disability correspondent Geoff Adams-Spink has been to Heathrow's brand new and much talked about Terminal 5 to see for himself. ADAMS-SPINK This is London Heathrow's infamous Terminal 5 that opened in the spring and generated the wrong kind of publicity straight away. It was designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership and it's the largest single span building in Britain. The walls are made of glass and steel and the roof is a curved wave form, there's natural light everywhere. It's a far cry from the rather shabby utilitarian buildings of Terminals 1-4. This is a structure that goes beyond mere functionality and suggests vision and even ambition. So it's perhaps fitting that Terminal 5 was the first to implement new arrangements for assisting disabled passengers. The new EU regulation that comes into force tomorrow makes it the airport operator's responsibility to provide help rather than the airlines. The thinking behind it is that people will get a more seamless service, not just from check-in to aircraft but from the moment they arrive at the airport. How does it all work in practice? I'm joined by Sean Cowlam, the logistics director at Heathrow. COWLAM We didn't think it made sense to change the arrangements post the opening of T5, so we took the opportunity on the opening of the new terminal to begin with the new arrangements. This also allowed us, the airport operator, to gain some experience before we rolled out the same level of assistance across the rest of the airport. ADAMS-SPINK On the rest of the airport have you already switched to a new arrangement or is that going to happen as of Saturday? COWLAM We've already switched from the 17th June we're providing the pan airport service. ADAMS-SPINK What happens then when a passenger arrives into Terminal 5 and needs to connect to a flight in Termimal 4 let's say? COWLAM In that case the PRM team here in Terminal 5 will take the passenger to the bussing point and will arrange for the passenger to be met in Terminal 4 upon arrival in the transfer bus. We're well aware that that handover, both on to the bus and off the bus, is a critical area and it's an area that we've been focusing on to make sure the communications are in place so that passengers are not left in the lurch. ADAMS-SPINK The teething troubles here weren't confined to long queues and missing luggage. My 大象传媒 colleague Stefan King is a wheelchair user who had the misfortune to land in the early hours of the morning on a delayed flight from Aberdeen just after the terminal had opened. No one came to help Stefan off the plane so his father had to drag him from his seat to his wheelchair. This was just the start of their problems. Stefan's words are spoken by his assistant Andy. STEFAN THROUGH ANDY As we were directed from the aircraft to the terminal we were given a lift to go down. But when we got to the lift they were all out of order. After a few minutes of the manager not knowing what to do the ground staff supposed to be bringing the aisle chair brought two normal chairs. They misunderstood what I was needing. ADAMS-SPINK Yes because if they'd arrived onto the aircraft with an ordinary manual wheelchair they wouldn't have been able to get to you anyway would they? STEFAN THROUGH ANDY So the manager said can you take these people to arrivals using a goods lift. The person showing them in the terminal didn't know where he was going, so they ended up going back up again to the same place. He ummed and ahhed a bit decided to take us through international arrivals. ADAMS-SPINK And of course you'd been on a domestic flight so you probably didn't have your passport. STEFAN THROUGH ANDY Yeah after walking what seemed like miles we went into international arrivals and there was no one around, it was deserted and suddenly an immigration officer turned up, demanding to know what we were doing there and where our passports were. ADAMS-SPINK And at this time was the assistance worker still with you? STEFAN THROUGH ANDY Yeah he was there but he was absolutely useless because he was still pushing the two wheelchairs that they didn't need, so my dad had to push the wheelchair and the rest of the luggage as well. The people demanded our passports, even though we kept on telling them we were from Aberdeen, but they didn't seem very interested. ADAMS-SPINK So how did you get out of there in the end, it sounds like a sort of Kafkaesque nightmare? STEFAN THROUGH ANDY Fortunately my dad had his driving licence because we'd hire a car whilst we were there. But when they pointed at me I had to say we had no identification. So they consorted with each other, because there were security guards there by this stage and then fortunately they finally let me through. ADAMS-SPINK So Sean what reassurance can you give to Stefan and people like him that this experience was just a one-off? COWLAM I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to Stefan for the service that he received. I think Stefan's experience was perhaps very early in the life of T5, I would be disappointed if the same thing happened again and certainly in terms of way finding our staff are much more well aware of the intricacies of Terminal 5 and the rest of the airport. We've now got over three months experience, so we're looking forward to the change in the law this Saturday that will require the airlines to give us more information and advance warning, which is helpful for our planning. But I think it was the right decision to go live in Terminal 5 early and indeed we've been operating in advance of legislation across the rest of the airport for a month now. ADAMS-SPINK When things do go wrong people will now be able to address their concerns to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Catherine Catterley is a barrister who specialises in discrimination cases. CATTERLEY The EU regulation obliges those essentially managing airports to provide assistance, so to ensure that assistance is provided to disabled people in the airport. And the regulation itself sets out specifically what that assistance should be, it also requires them to train their staff so that assistance can be provided and they also have to set quality standards. So it's quite prescriptive in many ways and it gives people a very clear entitlement to that assistance. At the moment you're reliant upon the Disability Discrimination Act which is all about what's reasonable and the regulation doesn't incorporate a concept of what's reasonable at all, it is just this assistance must be provided. ADAMS-SPINK Trying to get 27 member states all to conform in this way is quite ambitious do you expect it's going to take some time to bed in? CATTERLEY I think inevitably it will take time to bed in and I think it will require a lot of testing I think probably by disabled people and also ensuring that enforcement bodies actually take action where there are problems. Hopefully eventually there will be a standard that everyone operates to and disabled people will no longer encounter those situations where they're left stranded without assistance and can't get where they need to be. ADAMS-SPINK According to the EHRC's Neil Crowther the new regulation will be made to work here in the UK and throughout the other 26 EU member nations. CROWTHER Clearly rather like an accessible tube station that doesn't have an accessible one to get off at the whole situation in Europe with huge variations in accessibility is not really going to work. So we want to make sure this genuinely is an EU wide shift and we'll try and develop those relationships. ADAMS-SPINK Could people be forgiven for thinking perhaps that a person with a learning disability or somebody with a vision impairment or somebody with impaired hearing doesn't fall into this quite tight category which is people with reduced mobility? CROWTHER The regulation that brings this in refers to disabled people and people with a reduced mobility. And our view really is that we should be looking to our own domestic legislation - to the Disability Discrimination Act - to understand what that means. So it's clear that that mobility may be caused or be a result of a factor that relates to somebody's age, whether it's an intellectual impairment, whether it's a hearing or sensory impairment. ADAMS-SPINK To get an idea of the logistical hurdles faced by disabled passengers in this and other airports I visited Dee Birkett, a Guardian travel writer and her teenage daughter, Storm, who's a wheelchair user. Between them they clock up thousands of air miles every year. STORM It's quite a stressful thing because you're all excited about going on holiday and it is a possibility - is your holiday going to be ruined, is something going to go wrong. ADAMS-SPINK What about the way the actual staff deal with you, do you feel that they behave appropriately, do they know how to lift you okay, do they talk to you rather than talking to whoever's with you? STORM They will sometimes ask you questions that are quite intrusive, I mean you can be asked can you walk five times in a period of half an hour and instead of asking me they'll ask my mum. But my mum will always say well ask her because she's the one that's in a wheelchair. DEE You just have to double check absolutely everything because whatever you book and whatever you say to people in actual fact it isn't there when you get there. And every time we arrive at an airport, as a family, it's as if we're the first family ever to arrive at an airport who has a child who uses a wheelchair and every time you have to go through from the very, very beginning and you have to actually be quite hardened against it. They don't treat you as they would another family, even if they get it right for the disabled person they don't see that disabled person as part of a family, as part of something bigger, so we're never sat together, for example, every other family travels altogether but we don't. Or if the disabled person is given assistance on an ambilift, to lift on and off the plane, we have to go a different route. So we start our holiday going separate routes. Every other family goes the same route together. ADAMS-SPINK The new rules will also apply to people with temporary conditions - a broken leg for example - and provide a right to assistance on board an aircraft. Eventually aircraft will have to be designed to take account of people's access needs. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will be monitoring complaints, will support people who want to take a case to court and can refer matters to the Civil Aviation Authority. The CAA can prosecute and if successful the guilty party faces unlimited fines. As many of us go in search of some summer sunshine it remains to be seen whether introducing a fundamental change at the height of the holiday season is quite such a bright idea. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 大象传媒 is not responsible for external websites |
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