Want to improve lives for people with learning disabilities? Listen to them

More than 90 organisations including self-advocacy and family-led groups and some 1,200 individuals have launched the Learning Disability Alliance England (LDA). The Alliance aims to raise awareness of issues such as the impact of austerity cuts and rising disability hate crime, as well as the problem of people with learning disabilities being stuck in treatment units and excluded from shaping the policies or services directed at them.Gary Bourlet, who has a mild learning disability, is unequivocal in his assessment of what needs to happen if the UK is to ensure that people with learning disabilities are wholly integrated into society and that mistreatment both inside and outside institutions is to cease.This has got to be about human rights, about civil rights,” says Bourlet. “We’ve got to get to a situation like the suffragettes or the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There has been some progress over the decades but…