Registered Blind?

[Rosemary F Johnson]

Hi - here's a question or two for any others here who've got
themselves registered.

First, someone please reassure me: once you're registered,
you're registered, aren't you? - you don't need to get the
hospital to fill in that long form and re-register you evry
year, do you?? - or every two years, even?


Why? Well, I've been registered for almost 2 years, with my
local council (a London Borough we'd better leave anonymous).
And for nearly 2 years I've had a Freedom Pass, which is what
the "bus pass" scheme for older citizens/people with
disabilities is called.

And got told I had to go in to the Social Services offices
during office hours - how fortunate I don't have to be in an
office working during office hours!! - with proof of residence. And when I got there, I got met with a young woman who was
trying to tell me AI had to be "assessed" - which meant her
filling in a form (on which she spelled my name wrong, despite
having it in front of her on the copy I'd brought of my
registration letter!) and asking me all sorts of questions about "what is the nature of your disability?" and "how does it affect you?" and "how does it affect your ability to walk?" I pointed
out, several times and pointedly, that her department had all
this information on file already because I was registered with
them as officially partially-sighted; so why was she having to
ask me all this? - and also pointed out this condition was
believed to be genetically-linked and "one can't change one's
genes in the way one changes one's trousers" - and that I was
*renewing* an existing pass, not applying first time off.

She gave no signs at all of knowing anything about, let alone
having access to, the fact I was already registered with them,
and insisted on filling in all this stuff - and asking me to
sign a form to authorise her to contact my GP/consultant for
confirmation.


Has anyone else ever come across this sort of thing????

- I know our council got a very bad report assessment recently
and has officially been classed as "failing", but surely not
even they have been so incompetant as to lose all the
registration database details?!


I have already filled in a Customer dis-Satisfaction Survey form to complain about this, and have contacted my councillor to ask
what on earth is going on, but would be interested to hear if
anyone else had experienced anything like this.

I'd also be interested in knowing if there's anyone else here
from the London area who has a Freedom Pass (disabled or
pensioner type) and if so how you found out when/where/how you
could use it. Our local social services weren't even able to
tell me what zones it covered, let alone which services I could
and couldn't use it on, or what times it was and wasn't valid for!
Rosemary

[Rosemary F Johnson]

An update on the registration/bus pass saga as per my earlier message.

I had a phone call this afternoon from a very apologetic woman in the council social services department, who'd had my complaint passed on to her via my local councillor. And was ringing to apologise for me having been pissed about by one of the department's staff (who she said was "new" and hadn't learned all the job yet, ha!), and that I was quite right and shouldn't have had to do that, but only needed to go to the One-Stop Shop and renew the pass with none of the messing about.

So, if anyone else has had a remotely similar experience with a council making a dog's dinner out of trying to renew a Freedom Pass when you're already on their register, give them what-for!

Rosemary

[Andrew MacLean]

Rosemary

I was browsing though old posts and found your question about registration. Getting registered is easy: betting de-registered is a bit of a pantimime and in my case, last year, involved more than one interview with the social work department who wanted to be sure that I really wanted to come off the register.

I managed!

Andrew