Progress with Disability Travel Passes

Last month I described how my disability travel pass ran out sometime ago and wasn’t renewed. I’m still battling away with this. I’ve asked some contacts who work in the field of Learning Disability, which short term memory difficulties falls under.

The LD team told me that Transport for Greater Manchester have asked for more evidence of the condition I have. Seemingly the fact that I already had a travel pass, and I’d already given them my psych assessment, wasn’t enough. So, it’s been necessary for me to dig into my files and pull out a load of old psych assessments, college assessments and the medical notes from my birth- the incident of the Acquired Brain Injury and the cause of the disability. The latter of these I had requested from The Royal Oldham Hospital several times before they sent it. This was some years ago. Point being, it wasn’t easy to come by.

Hassle.

The LD team called TfGM: they say they have a backlog of cases to deal with, but contradicting this, my understanding is that TfGM have changed their criteria somewhat. This doesn’t apply to me, but they have decided that having Autism is no longer part of said criteria. They just aren’t allowed passes any more. TfGM’s page seems to reflect this,  yet I can find NOTHING about this in local news like The M.E.N. People should be shouting from the rooftops that thousands of disabled people in Greater Manchester have been thrown off their public transport passes, yet there’s no coverage in the news.

Oldham, of course, lost The Oldham Evening Chronicle some years ago. The nightly paper had a huge presence at one time. If you were mentioned of photographed, people you knew would see it. Although the print publication ceased in August ‘17, there’s recently been a resurrection online of sorts online. It doesn’t have the widespread influence that its predecessor had over the town but has the same remit of local news. (They haven’t covered this disability travel pass furore.)

Anyway, I’ve scanned in a ton of these memory-related documents so they’re in PDF format. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while anyway, but when your hospital notes are a couple of hundred pages, you need an office scanner that can whip through them. This is now complete, and forwarded to LD.

Let’s see how TfGM respond.