A Fair Hearing Conference: view from the podium
Report on Leigh Day’s learning disabilities conference by Daniel Randall Nason
Leigh Day’s ‘A Fair Hearing?’ in London on 10th July was about the voices of people with a learning disability and/or autism in the justice system. As self-advocates Stay Up Late ambassadors Daniel Randall Nason and Andrew Walker were invited to give a presentation. Here, Daniel reflects on the day.
We were very pleased to be invited by Leigh Day to speak at their A Fair Hearing conference. Leigh Day are a firm of lawyers who do a lot of legal work on disabilities. It’s been my dream to get up and speak from a podium. I talked about Stay Up Late and my role as an Ambassador for the charity and Andrew talked about our manifesto and our No Bedtimes campaign. We were really pleased with the response we got and the questions we got from the audience afterwards.
We stayed for the rest of the day. One of the speakers, Roy, was really brave getting up there and talking about his terrible experiences in care and in prison. It’s good that he’s now getting support and advice to challenge the authorities who let him down.
Norman Lamb MP was another one of the speakers. He praised the work of Stay Up Late in his speech and I asked him what one change he’d most like to make for people with learning disabilities. He said it was important to make sure people with learning disabilities were listened to.
We really enjoyed the conference – and the buffet! Even though it had been cleared away before we had the chance to fill up our doggie bags for the train journey home. We’d like to thank Leigh Day for making us feel very welcome and we look forward to working with them on more campaigns.
