Accessible Procurement: A Market Driven Approach Which Benefits All Australians

Institute of Public Administration Australia conference

Session: new perspectives on service delivery

Perth , 20 September 2007

Graeme Innes, Commissioner responsible for Disability Discrimination

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet.

I'd like to start with a story from a visit I made to Perth about a year ago.

Some of you might recall media coverage regarding a young man undergoing cancer treatment who was required to attend a job capacity assessment the day he got out of hospital, to establish his entitlement to disability support payments.

Apart from other concerns raised about this, there were indications that the office he had been required to attend was not accessible to people using wheelchairs, as he was.

Of course, Commonwealth Government contracts for provision of employment services have always contained a clause requiring providers to comply with applicable laws, including, since 1992, the Disability Discrimination Act.

I wrote to the Minister for Human Services asking him to clarify whether the premises in this case were in fact accessible. The Minister responded very promptly, passing on to me assurances from the service provider that their premises were accessible and met all relevant standards.

Because I happened to be in Perth at the time, I decided to have a look for myself.

What I found was a building with quite a few steps at the front. There was a sign indicating a path to an accessible entrance at the side. But the path was clearly steeper than recommended in relevant Australian Standards for wheelchair access, and the accessible entrance wasn't able to be entered independently but required ringing a bell for staff assistance.

Interestingly also the sign indicating the way to the accessible entrance had two fresh piles of brick dust on the path below where the sign had been attached to the wall. My colleague the then Sex Discrimination Commissioner, who was also with me, deployed her experience as a former journalist to interview passers by to confirm that the sign had not been there prior to the media coverage of the young man's experience.

Now, even though a raid like this may be as exciting as public service procurement policy issues get, I admit that it's not quite up to James Bond excitement levels. But I can say that not only was the Minister's faith shaken in the assurances provided by the service provider, but that he quickly stirred his Department into action.

The Department of Human Services, in co-operation with my own office, produced an accessibility checklist and required all funded service providers to complete an audit against that list within a short period or face losing their contracts.

With the Department's permission, I have built on their checklist to produce a set of Guidelines for Access to Buildings and Services. These were released in July this year and are available on our website.

The guidelines are intended for service providers and owners and operators of premises in general. In view of the history of the development of these guidelines however I should stress that they are very much intended for public sector as well as private sector use.

The title for my remarks today refers to accessible procurement as a market driven approach which benefits all Australians.

The bit about benefiting all Australians should, I hope, be obvious enough.

Well known Australian Bureau of Statistics figures tell us that around 20% of Australia 's people have some level of disability – you only need to have a family of five, or no family but four friends or colleagues, to expect disability to be an issue directly or indirectly for you. And as we age as individuals and as a population disability becomes more and more likely to be a matter of direct experience.

Government services obviously need to be available to all of the public not just 80 per cent. And very often there will be a higher proportion of people with disability among the intended targets of government services. For disability employment services of course that needs no further comment, but the point is true more generally.

The economic justification for us getting paid as public servants and for governments to provide services is these days widely accepted as occurring where markets would otherwise fail to address individual and social needs, and/or where government intervention is needed to address unacceptable levels of social disadvantage.

And whether we are talking about people who are disadvantaged by being unemployed, or people older than working age, or people with major health issues, or indigenous people, or people who are educationally disadvantaged – all these categories are accompanied by higher than average rates of disability.

Despite this, government service provision has not always been good at recognising that disability is an inherent part of the diversity of the community we are paid to serve, any more than markets have always delivered products usable by all members of the community including people with disabilities.

This week I'll be releasing a discussion paper on accessibility issues in relation to consumer products. Integration of digital technology into household goods should mean products becoming more easily usable by people who have limited hearing or sight or memory or hand function – remember that's many of us now and almost all of us as we get older – instead of becoming more difficult or impossible. I'll be looking to work further in partnership with industry bodies and with other players such as consumer protection authorities to see what can be done to promote both better accessibility of products in this area, and better access to information for consumers on accessibility features of products that exist.

Of course, and coming back to procurement, in order to deliver services to the public, government agencies themselves are routinely in the position of consumers in the marketplace for products and services.

If the purpose of public procurement is to provide for provision of services to the public – inherently including people with disability – or to support the work of public sector employees – again, including people who either have now or might at any time acquire a disability – then it seems clear to me that equipment or premises or facilities which are not accessible to or usable by people with disability are not fit for purpose, to put it in consumer affairs terms.

To put it in terms more familiar in a procurement environment, failure to address accessibility issues in public procurement involves failure to secure the value for money which is a central requirement of procurement policy.

Obviously it will avoid difficulty, delay and additional expense, if premises, equipment and facilities are designed to meet "universal design" principles, to accommodate the widest possible range of human needs, rather than having to make adjustments in work premises, facilities and equipment after the event, when an existing employee acquires a disability, or a jobseeker or a client with a disability arrives – or for that matter after an unhappy Minister calls the agency after unfavourable press publicity .

Having procurement decisions effectively include accessibility seems to me to involve four things:

• Everyone making procurement decisions has to know that accessibility is required;
• It needs to be easy enough for people making procurement decisions to know for themselves and to specify to suppliers what accessibility means in the context of any particular procurement decision;
• There need to be accessible products services and facilities actually available to be procured;
• And it needs to be easy enough for people making procurement decisions to find products and services and check their accessibility features.

The report of the National Inquiry on Employment and Disability which the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released last year contains a whole chapter on these issues.

I won't try to go through it in detail now in the time we have available but if you have not already looked at this report and the chapter on procurement in particular I urge you to do so.

In summary, though, we recommended that the Federal Government give consideration to following the lead of the United States government and adopting a mandatory accessible procurement policy, including specifying performance criteria for what accessibility means; and also consider establishing an information resource on accessible procurement comparable to the Canadian government's Accessible Procurement Toolkit.

We also recommended that other Australian governments should consider similar policies.

The evidence from the United States is that governments taking a lead in their own procurement on the issues (1), (2), and (4) that I listed will have a significant impact on issue (3) as industry responds to clear market signals from a major purchaser. That intended impact is in fact why our recommendations recognised that government might need to undertake a Regulation Impact Statement analysis before adopting a mandatory accessible procurement policy.

We have been very pleased with the degree of acceptance and implementation that government has given to many of the recommendations of the National Inquiry on Employment and Disability, including the introduction of the Job Access one stop information shop. But disappointingly I have to say there has been a complete lack of any progress at the Federal level on this issue of accessible procurement.

Being based in Sydney I was thinking of going along to APEC to promote discussions of these issues between our Prime Minister and his United States and Canadian counterparts.

As things turned out, it's probably just as well not having had another bearded man arriving in the security zone unannounced and flying the Canadian flag. I'm always on the lookout for ways of raising the profile of disability issues, and the idea of that sort of TV coverage for accessible procurement does have its attractions, but I guess I'm not quite that brave or silly yet.

What I will do though, and what I am announcing today, is that in the next few weeks I will be issuing draft accessible procurement guidelines myself for comment and discussion.

These guidelines will cover issues of accessibility in information and communications technology, which is the particular focus of United States policy, but will also be intended to address the implications for procurement of issues of accessibility of buildings and services more generally.

I would still far prefer that governments pick up this issue with their own accessible procurement policies and procedures to turn those policies into reality. That, I think, would be far more helpful to people making procurement decisions as purchasers of equipment, services and facilities; and that would clearly have more impact in sending the right signals to suppliers in these markets.

But the extra information that guidelines from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission can provide, on existing obligations under disability discrimination law and how to go towards meeting them, seems to me a contribution worth making. I look forward to working with all agencies and individuals interested in making progress on this issue in the interests of better value for the public's money and better service to all of us.