The Minister for Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030, Pablo Bustinduy, has made this announcement at the National Council on Disability, where he also confirmed that he will reform the Law on Dependency in the same preliminary draft.

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The reform of the Disability Law will be passed this summer

Pablo Bustinduy chaired the first plenary session of the National Council on Disability in this legislature. He did so with a speech in which the minister announced that the reform of the Disability Act would be approved this summer in the Council of Ministers. This will take the form of a draft bill that will also include the reform of the Dependency Law and will focus on the personal autonomy of the people covered by both laws. About disability, Pablo Bustinduy stressed that this legislative reform is being carried out to bring the law into line with the constitutional mandate that arose after the modification of article 49 of the Spanish Constitution at the beginning of this year 2024.

This new constitutional article establishes that people with disabilities should exercise their rights ‘in conditions of real and effective freedom and equality’ and that, to this end, the ‘special protection’ needed by these people should be regulated by law. For this reason, Pablo Bustinduy pointed out that they are designing the new measures that will update the Disability Act ‘from a focus on inclusion, universal accessibility and autonomy’. In this way, the minister stressed, the mandates of the UN International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities will be raised to the highest regulatory level. And this will have concrete effects, he said. It will mean, for example, eliminating automatic dismissal from the Workers’ Statute in certain situations of supervening disability. The law will now prioritise the adaptation of employment for the person who needs it or the change of their functions. On the other hand, the measures in the White Paper on Employment and Disability will be deployed with the aim, said the minister, of making this a legislature in which ‘more and better quality employment’ is achieved for people with disabilities.

In his speech, Pablo Bustinduy also referred to the importance that the disability agenda is having this term of office and that, according to the minister, it has provided great parliamentary consensus, thus consolidating ‘as an element of social and political cohesion’. He also wanted to highlight the work being carried out by the Spanish Government in the area of disability over the last four years. In this period, funding for policies aimed at this purpose has increased by 468%. This ‘historic’ increase, the minister pointed out, represents a total of 293 million euros, aimed at meeting the objectives set by the Spanish Disability Strategy 2022-2030, and whose fulfilment already exceeds 40%.

In addition to this, Pablo Bustinduy placed special emphasis on the investment in accessibility being made by the Spanish Government through the Next Generation funds, an investment of 200 million euros transferred almost entirely to the Autonomous Communities and which ‘have made Spain a pioneering country in this area’, he said. Finally, the minister referred to women and girls with disabilities, who are specifically mentioned in the new article 49. He stated that our country ‘has already enshrined feminism and inclusion at the highest regulatory level, and now we must honour this commitment with public policies that transfer it to the day-to-day lives of people with disabilities’. On this point, she recalled that the ministry she heads has launched a Specific Plan to promote the Rights of Women and Girls with Disabilities and that it will also carry out a macro-survey on male violence against this group.

The National Council on Disability is a collegiate inter-ministerial and consultative body, which institutionalises the collaboration of the associative movement of people with disabilities, their families and the General State Administration, for the definition and coordination of a coherent policy of comprehensive care. During the plenary session, the monitoring report of the Spanish Disability Strategy was presented and fundamental issues such as the impact of the reform of article 49 of the Spanish Constitution on the different ministerial departments and the measures planned to adapt their policies to the new constitutional mandate were addressed.