How can we make parliament more representative when we’ve scrapped the fund for disabled MPs?

For the last few years, aspiring MPs and councillors who have a disability have been able to get help from the Access to Elected Office fund. But it's being closed in March.

By Helen Lewis

(Photo By David Blunkett's guide dog Sadie at Labour conference. Photo: Getty)

In her spare room, Emily Brothers shows me a battered old Braille machine. It looks sturdy, like a toolbox, and weighs a tonne. “When I was ten, and losing my sight – well, it was 1974 and my dad was on strike,” she says. “We didn’t have any money, and the men in his trade union got together to buy me this.”

Forty years on, the machine still works; Brothers punches out a card with my name on to prove it. She now uses it in her effort to be elected as MP for Sutton and Cheam, a constituency on the outskirts of London at the far south of the Northern Line. Her chances are, it is fair to say, not good; Labour scored just 7 per cent of the vote in this Lib Dem-Tory marginal at the last election.