Member

I strongly support Amendment 3. Electric wheelchairs are fragile in many ways and, if handled badly, can be damaged or destroyed. The little 55-kilogram chair I use for all international travel is a baby version of the one I use here. That little chair has done most of the journeys I mentioned at the start. Now, I cannot use visual aids in the Committee, but I simply ask noble Lords to imagine this: how would they lift an ordinary chair with arms? Naturally, one would grab the arms and lift it that way. That is what all baggage handlers want to do with my electric wheelchair, and it rips out the wiring. The seats on these things are not bolted down: they simply sit on a steel piston and are removable—that is not my design, but it is the way they are done. That little chair I am talking about is a replacement for the one destroyed at Frankfurt. I was taken off from the high-lift lorry and watched my chair come trundling down the baggage elevator and drop six feet onto the concrete. The other damage is caused when they push them in gear rather than in freewheel mode and damage the gearbox.