Excerpt from: The Guardian (click for full article)
My name is Shairaz and I am a member of United Response's campaigns panel. We are a group of people with learning disabilities and some family members who want to speak out on issues that are important to us.
United Response asked us to tell them what we thought about the government's plans for social care. The government has put these plans in its white paper and draft care and support bill.
Our opinions have been turned into a report by United Response, published today, called Our future. In the report we tell people about what it is like to have a disability and what we think the government should be doing to make things better for us.
Many of us (two-thirds) had not heard about the changes that the government was going to make to social care, before we took part in the report. Those of us who did know about the changes were worried about our benefits as we knew that funding was being cut.
For me, I think that if I was prime minister, I'd make sure that everyone had better support and funding.
I'd make sure that disabled people were always cared for and that they were not neglected and I'd want people to have the facilities and things that suit them; for example someone might need a wheelchair or things changed in their home to make it easier to live there.
It's really important that people's living environment is right, because it helps people to live a good life.
The government is looking at who will receive care in the future and how it will be funded. We all felt that disabled people should receive free care.
It's all about fairness. Some people will need support forever and the government just has to accept us as we are.
We didn't choose to be disabled, so it's not fair for the government to expect us to pay. A lot of the time people with disabilities are neglected, and they shouldn't be.
We need to help all people with disabilities.
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