Elevator and Escalator Company Schindler celebrated after the launch of two brand new cruise liners equipped with 76 Schindler elevators and escalators from the Genoa shipyard of Fincantieri.

The two cruise liners are the latest additions to the Costa Crociere fleet and were named Costa Pacifica and Costa Luminosa. Both ships are 290 meters long but the The Pacifica is the larger of the two ships, at 114,000 gross tonnage and has the capacity to hold 4,118 passengers and crew. Movement board the ships 14 decks is easy with 60 elevators to hand which includes three hydraulic platforms for disabled access.

“We are proud to have equipped these two new liners,” says Francesco Delton, the head of Schindler’s marine unit. “Schindler is now present on almost every Costa ship, thanks also to our preventative maintenance service.”

This has got to be the worse stair lift commercial ever made and there have been some pretty bad ones over the years. 

This gem from Acorn stair lifts pictures an elderly man who has no trouble jumping out of his new stair lift, in fact he looks like he has as much need for a stair lifts as the little boy.

I never saw this particular advert when they showed it on T.V but I can’t imagine it ran for very long, you can feel yourself cringing while you’re watching it.

Thankfully most stair lift adverts are found online these days, I doubt you will ever find one this bad.

Justice was served when a Plymouth man who has made thousands of pounds conning innocent pensioners was jailed for 14 months.  The conman had been posing as a stair lift salesman and convinced his vulnerable clients to order unnecessary and expensive equipment which he then never delivered.  He won the confidence of his victims by creating an air on non-existent professionalism, including the logos of major manufacturers in his adverts for instance, even though no contracts or agreements had been reached between Mr. Roach and the said companies.

The road to him being convicted began when Trading Standards became aware that something was going on. Tragically, an elderly couple had lost their life savings and, as a further proverbial kick whilst they were down, had been left without access to all the floors of their home.  This then led on to an investigation into the practises of Mister Roach by Devon County Council who said that he had: “”cynically set out to deceive the elderly and disabled”. The council went on to say that:  “He took large sums of money from people for stair lifts and then didn’t supply them. In some cases he also took away their existing stair lift leaving them with no means of accessing the first floor of their homes,”

The story raises the argument over whether or now older people are informed adequately about how to deal with people who may come to their door attempting to sell them illegitimate products. Perhaps campaigns which warn pensioners to always ask for Identification of any caller need to be stepped up and enhanced. Old people, especially lonely ones, are vulnerable to conmen and need help to be able to protect themselves and their money.

All in all Roach has been charged with 13 different offences, ranging from breaches of the Theft Act, the Trade Descriptions Act, the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act and the Consumer Protection Act. The move to prosecute may well come too late for some elderly people who have lost their life savings to someone whom they thought they could trust and who they thought would provide them with a much higher quality of life. However, at least a 14 month jail-term means that the conman will be off the streets and that he will not be able to destroy the lives of any more Devonshire pensioners.

The 12,000 people who step through Doncaster Station to use its trains every single day will soon find that their travelling experience is more enjoyable with a £2million renovation and improvement scheme.

At the moment any passengers who wish to use the station but cannot tackle the rather steep and imposing stairs have to use a lift only designed for goods and freight; this is all set to change. A new 16-person lift will be introduced to make access to all the platforms much easier. The improvements are not going to stop there either.  The subway which runs beneath the platforms is also going to get a much-needed overhaul, taking it from drab to fab!  The work is part of a larger plan to transform Doncaster with a new transport interchange which will be built next to the Frenchgate Shopping Centre.   Eventually the Frenchgate, the bus interchange and the station will all be linked together meaning that travellers and tourists will get a much more fluid and accessible experience when they come to Doncaster.

The project also has an important environmental tangent to it; it is hoped that if it is made easier for people to use public transport within Doncaster, and indeed South Yorkshire as a whole, that more and more people will leave their cars at home and opt instead for the public transport network to get them to wherever it is they need to be. You can get on a train in Doncaster and be in London in around 2 and a half hours and so there are some definite high-speed travel links which the city will be hoping to make the most of once this project is complete. The said project has been going on for a while and, Ray Wicks of the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive has said, “”The transformation of the station is the last major step in providing a quality integrated transport hub in Doncaster.” Indeed, in such difficult economic times, getting people into the city, be it for business or consumerism, is now more important than ever.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this project though is one of equality.  Andy Hendry of the Doncaster Disabled People’s Alliance has commented that he believes people will be “over the moon” that they will now have a dedicated lift at their disposal rather than being forced to use one not designed for use by people.

Extra money is to be invested in making mainstream education more accessible for disabled students. £30million of public finances is to be set aside to fund the new Government initiative which will see things such as wheelchair ramps introduced to schools to make tackling the school terrain easier for those with physical handicaps.   An estimated 1900 schools will be able to benefit from the initiative which is being funded by a slice of a much larger funding pie- around £100million to make schools more accessible in a number of different ways.

It is hoped that the money will help people with a range if disabilities feel more at home within the school environment; money has been set aside for such essentials as stair lifts and those students who are visually impaired will have easier access to Braille books and customised computers.  The initiative is part of the Government’s aim of “social inclusion”, with the ultimate goal being that more students with physical or mental handicaps should be integrated into mainstream education rather than being excluded and pushed into separate special schools.

Behind these very large sums of money, often too high for us to comprehend fully, are personal stories which bring home just how helpful this funding will be.  A new dyslexia support centre will be set up in Lewisham, South London with a £90,000 grant and will help around 40 pupils who suffer from the said learning difficulty.  A grant of £100,000 is to be given to St. Ives Community School so that a lift can be installed in a three-storey building. It is hoped this lift will help those pupils of the school who have difficulty walking. The minister behind the funding, Jacqui Smith, has said that “The funding reflected the government’s efforts to improve the standards of education available to pupils with special needs,” but of course all children in the school will benefit if their learning environment is stimulated by people of different abilities and from different backgrounds.

It is hoped that this funding will be the first step in a grander program which will see exclusion of certain pupils from mainstream education come to an end and that a more inclusive state education system can be built up. The money put into schools now will pay off in the future when our children are schooled together and not separately.

Going out to a nightclub is one of the fundamental rite of passage for any young person within our society however, for disabled people, such a rite of passage has long been much harder to achieve. New Government legislation is aiming to change all that. All clubs with at least 25 members would have to adhere to disability discrimination laws if Government proposals to close the legal loophole are accepted.

Private clubs have long been successful in resisting sex discrimination laws but they may well find it much harder to fight this latest attempt to make such notoriously restrictive clubs more accessible; accessible in both senses of the word. Such clubs will be consulted on the extension to the Disability Discrimination Act over a period of weeks. Under the changes, the clubs would not be allowed to discriminate against members who were disabled or disabled people who were prospective members of the clubs. They would also have to make “reasonable” efforts to make their spaces more disabled-user friendly by making changes such as bringing in lifts and ramps or widening entrances. Those clubs failing to comply with this legislation could, if it were passed, have to pay compensation or be liable to suing for not adhering to the new laws.

Its not just clubs which would be affected by this legislation, political parties themselves are deemed, under law, to be private clubs and thus ministers are hoping that the changes will help bring more disabled people into active engagement with the political process.  “The change will help to further open up all areas of social and public life to disabled individuals,” commented Bela Gor, head of legal affairs and policy for the Employers Forum on Disability.

The move has drawn objection from some members of private clubs however, who feel that their traditional autonomy and independence is being encroached upon with Government legislation. However disabled rights groups have claimed that a compulsory change in the law is the only thing which will help solve the current situation; they have pointed out that voluntary Civil Rights legislation have rarely worked.  The Royal Air Force Club in London is one such private members club which is leading the way, installing a ramp to help its members, the average age of who, in the non-serving members, is 65. It is hoped more clubs will follow this lead and ensure that they are accessible, in every sense of the word, to the disabled population of England.