No-one should be more at risk during the Covid-19 pandemic because of the colour of their skin. We held a virtual roundtable event in December on how life has been for people with learning disabilities from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

Learning from each other

A poster was also produced to show what we talked about:

Covid-19 has been hard for everyone, but harder for people with learning disabilities from Black and Minority Ethnic communities. It is very important to hear the voices of people learning disabilities from those communities because Government information shows increased numbers of deaths of people with learning disabilities during Covid - but there are more deaths of people from BAME communities than we should expect.

We have joined The Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities and Learning Disability England to say this is not right. People should not have higher risk because they are from BAME groups. We wanted to find out why people with learning disabilities from BAME groups are more at risk and what we can do to better protect them.

We invited lots of people to talk about this. We wanted to hear from people with learning disabilities to find out what is going wrong, how they are being supported and what we can learn from good examples of support. We want to tell the Government and people that make the rules about what good support is.

About the event

The day was co-chaired by Lola Young, Baroness of Hornsey (Member of the House of Lords and human rights campaigner) and Scott Watkin BEM, our Head of Engagement.

We focused on two main areas:

• Listen and think – where the voices of people who are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups are heard
• Change and act – an opportunity to share good practice and show examples of how we can work together

We want to work together with people with learning disabilities and organisations to make change happen and make sure that everyone is kept safe in future.

You can watch the full roundtable below.