Hansard

I congratulate Pam Duncan-Glancy on securing this members’ business debate to mark the international day of persons with disabilities. This year’s theme is fostering disability-inclusive societies for advancing social progress. That theme recognises something very simple: that, when we remove barriers and create equal opportunities, we do not just help disabled people—we strengthen our whole society.

For me, that is not abstract. I grew up as a child of a deaf adult—a CODA—and, from a very young age, I was painfully aware that the world was not set up for people like my dad, who is deaf. I watched bank staff, officials and people in professional positions speak over him and treat him as if he was a child without capacity, simply because he could not hear. Decisions were made around him instead of with him. That was not about his abilities; it was about other people’s assumptions and ignorance, and it was degrading.

Now, as a mum of neurodivergent children with additional support needs, I see those patterns in different ways. My children, like so many others, have too often been treated as problems to be fixed—as disruptors in classrooms that were never designed with them in mind in the first place. Children know when they are seen as an inconvenience, and they sense that they do not belong in the very place where they should feel the safest. That does real harm to their confidence, their wellbeing and their education.

The motion before us recognises those everyday exclusions. It acknowledges that disabled people still face

“barriers ... in employment, education, transport and access to public services”

and it rightly commends disabled people’s contributions to our communities, our economy, our culture and our public life. That contribution is immense, but too often it is made in spite of, not because of, the system.

As a constituency MSP, and as convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, I hear time and again that our world is still not fit for purpose for many disabled people. We have a society in which some of the best players are left on the bench, not because they lack talent but because the game is set at hard mode for disabled people. As the Scottish Human Rights Commission has reminded us, human rights need to be built into the way in which we design services from the very start, not patched on at the end when the damage is already done.

I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for using her voice and her lived experience to challenge exclusionary structures and for bringing the motion to the chamber. I also thank the disabled people’s organisations, advocacy groups and charities across Scotland that fight, every single day, for equality and human rights, often while navigating the very barriers that they are campaigning to remove.

My hope, and my commitment, is for a Scotland where everyone can take part, whatever taking part means for them. For some, like Pam, that will be taking part in employment, politics or public life. For others, it will be living independently, travelling safely, learning in a classroom where they are understood and feel welcome or simply being part of their local community without facing a wall of barriers. All those things are equal and valid ambitions.

To my disabled constituents, and to disabled people across Scotland, I say this: you are not the problem. The problem is a world that has been built without you in mind. Let this international day of persons with disabilities be not just a date in our diary but a call to action that we answer with real, lasting, practical change.