Exclusive Interview With Lord Rix
A champion for the learning disability community
People with learning disabilities have a skilled and doughty fighter for their cause among the powerful in government and parliament: Lord Rix.
“Practically every domestic bill going through Parliament affects the lives of the 1.5 million people with learning disabilities and their families,” he says.
“The battles never really stop.”
Lord Rix, at 85, examines in detail the laws Parliament passes and represents the interests of the learning disability community. He is supported by a research office at Mencap, the first such parliamentary research office outside parliament which Rix argued for and got established in 1981.
The speech he made in early June on the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Bill is a clear example of his championing work.
65 percent of people with learning disabilities want to work: only 17 percent have work
He told the House: “The Bill quite rightly recognises that disabled people, particularly people with a learning disability, have been desperate for more education provision that leads them to meaningful, full-time, paid employment and an adult life. Only 17 percent of people with a learning disability are estimated to be in employment, while 65 percent want to work.
“Sadly, this is almost starting to feel like a permanent statistic, as I have been highlighting it continuously in my role as president of Mencap, the charity representing the United Kingdom’s 1.5 million people with a learning disability. The past decade has seen many plans and policies put forward that are intended to help people with a learning disability to find work.
“It is a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, for employment levels have remained stuck at around 17 percent, compared with 49 percent of all disabled people.
“I look forward to the day when I can stand up in this House complaining about the employment of people with a learning disability being at only 40 percent to 50 per cent, and I hope that this year’s legislative programme will help to take us to that point and beyond.”
Winning funds for short breaks
His words are backed with action. He proposed as long ago as 1995 that people with learning disabilities and their carers are funded for short breaks. Eventually he got the funding included in the last Children and Education Bill and now £400 million is allocated to pay for them over three years.
And on the day we interviewed Lord Rix he asked a penetrating question of the government: “Is the Minister aware that in 2007 and 2008 there were approximately 7,000 prosecutions for racially motivated crime and yet only 141 prosecutions for disability hate crime? Does this mean that disability hate crime is much less of a problem, or is it simply that the Crown Prosecution Service and the police are failing to take it as seriously as other hate crime?”
A rather shame-faced minister replied that the government had not collected statistics as well or as accurately as it should. The figures underestimated the number of disability hate crimes, the minister said, pledging to get to grips with the statistics.
Coordinating pressure
Lord Rix helps to coordinate the work of MPs and Peers interested in learning disabilities in Parliament. He is joint chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Learning Disabilities. Its last meeting, which Lord Rix chaired, attracted 15 MPs and peers and 43 others to a discussion on how the Equalities Bill going through Parliament would affect people with learning disabilities. Lord Rix has no party affiliations: sitting as a “cross bencher”. As such has influence in any and all parties.
He not only works on the stage of the House of Lords. “There is a lot of work ‘off stage’ talking to ministers,” Lord Rix says.
Using fame to get heard
It was his success on the stage which led him to his current championing role. His daughter Shelley was born with Down’s syndrome in 1959. By 1961 he was lobbing and fund raising to champion the cause of all people with learning disabilities in the country. He used his fame as an actor to open doors others could not and to get heard where others could not be heard.
He met the then Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, to ask if the parents of newly born babies with learning disabilities could be told of their local support society. Powell told him that the NHS was not a “postal service” and that it was “absolutely unnecessary” and doctors and nurses knew how to handle it.
“In the 1940s, 50s and even the early 60s parents of children with Down’s syndrome were told to put the child away in care, forget them and to start their lives again,” Lord Rix says.
Inclusion
Today Lord Rix has a single word of advice for parents with learning disabilities. “Inclusion". They need to be accepted as part of the human race. Included in sport, in schools, in holidays. Whatever they can attain they show with their attainment their value. Until 1970 many people with learning disabilities were considered uneducable. They were considered second rate, the established view was for a long time that people with learning disabilities had nothing to say.
“This is where the Rix Centre helps so much. It helps them to communicate.”
Lord Rix is only the second person made a peer for his work in the charity sector. He is only the third peer who was an actor, following Lawrence Olivier and Bernard Miles.
On the boards again
Lord Rix not only operates in the House of Lords and “off stage” lobbying government but he is taking a one-man show on the road called Peer Around Whitehall. That is a reference to the Whitehall Theatre, at the other end of Whitehall from House of Lords, where he managed his acting company and performed. In all he gave 12,000 performances in 11 farces some of which he co-wrote. His farces became a high point of TV when broadcast in the 1960s.
In his one-man show Lord Rix talks about his years as an actor and manager on the stage where he was dubbed “The King of Farce”. The review of his first performance, in Louth, called it “a performance fit for a king.”
His skills as a presenter have also been used to promote the issues of the learning disability community on TV. He lobbied the
A champion driven
What drives a man of 85, who could be resting on his laurels, to work so hard for the learning disability community? Again, he is pithy in his comment: “Guilt.” He feels guilty that he and his wife, the actress Elspeth Gray, took the advice of the doctors in the late 1950s and had Shelley put in a home, hence his strong advice to the parents of children with learning disabilities now to include their children in their lives.
Lord Rix uses his presentation skills as an actor, his organising skills as a manager and his commitment as a parent to represent the learning disability community to the public and the powerful.
The community could have no better champion.
