Consultation on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD): analysis of responses

1. Introduction

Background

This report presents the analysis from the Scottish Government Consultation on its Draft Delivery Plan 2016-2020 on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ( UNCRPD).

The Scottish Government's ambition is that disabled people should have the same equality and human rights as non-disabled people. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ( UNCRPD) is the framework they will use to deliver that change. The Scottish Government has presented 54 commitments in its delivery plan, which sets out the Scottish Government's approach to implementing UNCRPD in Scotland over the period 2016-20. The delivery plan is structured around four main outcomes that the Scottish Government and its partners aim to achieve, with a number of commitments outlined under each outcome. It also identifies three "cross-cutting" themes, which are ways of working needed in order to deliver the commitments.

The Consultation Process

The consultation was open from 8 September 2015 to 4 January 2016. The deadline was then extended until 18 January to allow more time for consultees to respond. The consultation was available in a number of formats, including Easy Read, and consultees were invited to respond in a number of different ways, including online, via email and via post.

Funding was provided to Disabled People's Organisations ( DPOs) to support them to engage with disabled people across Scotland as part of the consultation and the Independent Living in Scotland ( ILiS) project produced a resources pack to support this process.

Some organisations provided information about the engagement they had undertaken in order to respond to the consultation. Examples include:

• Inclusion Scotland held a number of engagement events with a range of partners and groups of people and engaged with nearly 200 people at these events, and carried out an online survey which 38 people responded to.
• Sense Scotland ran "Our Voice" consultation groups
• Scottish Disability Equality Forum held three road shows, with 64 attendees, and conducted an online survey which received 57 responses

The consultation consisted of a number of closed questions, (indicating agreement or disagreement) and open questions inviting consultees to provide comments. An open question inviting comment was included for each of the 54 commitments in the delivery plan.

Analysis is based on those who responded to the consultation and is therefore not necessarily representative of the wider population.

Consultation responses were analysed and allocated to certain themes under each question. For any given question, the number of themes identified might be higher than the number of comments received as one comment could include a number of themes.

Who Responded

There were 91 responses to the consultation. Of these two-thirds (61) were received from groups/organisations and one third (30) were received from individuals. The largest category of respondent was third sector/equality groups who submitted 38 of the responses (42%). 89 respondents gave permission for their responses to be published.

Table 1, below, shows the breakdown of responses, according to respondent category. Group/organisation respondents were asked to select what type of group/organisation they belonged to, where they did not supply an answer, this was input as part of the analysis process.

As a number of third sector organisations had engaged with their members prior to responding to the consultation, more people were engaged with and contributed to the consultation responses than the 91 responses which were received.

Table 1: Distribution of responses by category of respondent