Has the current crisis affected your ability to get food? DEFRA would like to hear from you.
Disability Rights UK continues to campaign for safe access to food and other essential items for disabled people during the Covid-19 pandemic. In partnership with a number of disabled, older people’s and unpaid carers’ charities, we are inputting into the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to improve access to food.
In a shared letter, we wrote to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the 15th April, to notify him of the lack of instore and online reasonable adjustments provided by supermarkets, for many disabled and older people who fall outside of the 1.5 million identified by the government, as “clinically” at risk of COVID 19.
Prior to this, Disability Rights UK wrote to the CEOs of nine major supermarket chains, about the lack of priority for online delivery slots and failure to make sufficient reasonable adjustments in store, which continue to make shopping difficult, even impossible and unsafe, for many disabled and older people and their carers. We are extremely disappointed that the biggest supermarkets including Tesco’s, Sainsburys, Morrisons and Asda have not replied and insist that they will only talk to disability organisations through government. We find this unacceptable.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission, has this week written to the British Retail Consortium regarding the need for supermarkets to make reasonable adjustments for their disabled customers, under the Equality Act.
Along with other charities, we are now in regular dialogue with DEFRA and continue to express our concerns and offer solutions for supermarkets. A virtual roundtable with the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at DEFRA is scheduled for early next week, as is a virtual meeting between, DEFRA, representatives from supermarkets and representatives of the charities.
Finally, DEFRA has also launched an online public survey for people to offer their views and experiences of shopping for food during the pandemic: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=nt3mHDeziEC-Xo277ASzSsdf6aRbb_hHi61kcnJ3-KJUOFFXNEhLSDlFTUZaQzU1TlNEWVkwUVhHUC4u
The deadline to complete the survey is 5pm on Tuesday 28th April. If you are able to, please do participate, to share your views and to support our campaign.