Jacob Collier

I beg to move, That this House has considered e-petition 706513 relating to evacuation chairs in schools and colleges. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec, and a privilege to lead this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. It is especially appropriate that we are having the debate during UK Disability History Month, which asks us to recognise the realities faced by disabled people in our society and to confront the barriers that remain. Few things bring those barriers into clearer focus than the question of whether disabled children can evacuate safely from their school in an emergency. More than 100,000 people signed this petition, because they believe that every child deserves a safe and dignified exit from a building during a fire alarm or real fire, and that disabled pupils must not face greater danger than their friends. I pay tribute to the petition’s creator, 16-year-old Lucas Vezza-O’Brien, who is here with us in the Gallery today. He is joined by his mum, and by Nick from the Emergency Group, who has been supporting Lucas in his campaign and donated evacuation chairs to Lucas’s school. Lucas has shown incredible courage in reliving a horrifying experience so that other children will not go through the same ordeal. I want to start the debate with Lucas’s story and the reason why he started the petition in the first place. In November of last year, a small electrical fire broke out at Hyde high school. Staff followed the procedures available to them. Pupils were evacuated, but Lucas, who uses a wheelchair, was taken to a designated safe area—rather than being evacuated with his classmates—because the school did not have an evacuation chair to bring him downstairs. He was led to a room on an upper floor and left there, alone and with the smell of smoke in the air. What makes that even more disturbing is that after Lucas was placed in that refuge, the fact that he was still in the building was not reported to firefighters. He waited in that room while everyone else believed that he had been brought out to safety. The fear that Lucas felt is captured in the poem that he wrote afterwards, which has touched so many people. He says: “The bell screams loud the smoke runs fast Footsteps pound as students dash past The fire alarm wails its desperate cry But here I sit just asking why No ramp, no chair to help me flee Just stairs that laugh and imprison me My hands shake tight upon my wheels A rising fear too sharp to feel”. That is a powerful reminder that disabled children and the wider disability community are too often asked to trust systems that have not been built for them.