Since 2010, BuDS has helped its volunteers towards work. Our Reach4Work project, created in 2018, codified and developed that help, creating a professional wrap-around service for our disabled volunteers who want to move into or closer to work.
BuDS is exceptionally successful at moving disabled jobseeker volunteers into or closer to work…
Please note that the BuDDies scheme is currently on hold due to ongoing challenges facing charity funding across England. Find out more at the button below.
Are you feeling lonely or stressed at home? Need a friendly chat with someone who understands? The BuDS BuDDies are here to help!
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BuDS publishes some of our articles in EasyRead format. These articles are produced by our volunteers, and so our capacity is limited. Over time we will publish more EasyRead articles. Please be patient with us whilst we grow this project.
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The BuDS Enquiries Team answers questions and queries from disabled people about a very wide range of issues. We try to fill the gaps left by other support services and helplines, so we often support disabled people with complex and difficult issues.
Any disabled person in England can contact the Enquiries project for help. Parents, carers, and supporters can also contact us on behalf of a disabled person. We don’t have strict rules about who we can help: we will always do our best to support you and will let you know immediately if, for any reason, we can’t.
The Enquiries project is staffed entirely by volunteers, many of them disabled people themselves. We are often very busy and there may be a delay in getting back to you. We are sorry about this, but we can only do so much. The Enquiries project is not a crisis or emergency service.
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The BuDS SEND Transitions Service is a three-year project funded by The Rothschild Foundation. The purpose of the SEND Transitions Service is to improve the experience of disabled children and young people moving through key transitions within school education and from school education into work or further/higher education. It will do this by:
The SEND Transitions Service is made up of workstreams from a number of BuDS projects, principally Fair4All Education and Reach4Work.
To learn more about the Reach4Work workstream, which is looking at disabled young people’s transition from education to employment, click here.
Fair4All Visitors is a BuDS project to help visitor attractions to be more accessible and inclusive for disabled people.
The Fair4All Education project tackles the most important educational issues facing disabled children and young people, and their parents/carers, in Bucks.
The core of the Fair4All Education project is a ‘working community’ of professionals, parents, carers and disabled young people who are passionate about making a real difference. Working under the BuDS umbrella, the Fair4All Education team works together to define an agenda for action and plan how change will be made to happen.
Read MoreDisabled people are often excluded from outdoor public events. This is not because they do not want to attend these events, but because the way the event is organized and staged creates barriers that make it difficult or impossible for them to attend. BuDS’ free-to-use Fair4All event project helps event organisers remove those barriers and attract more disabled people to their events, making them more successful. There are over 40,000 disabled people in Buckinghamshire and over 100,000 families with a disabled member, so being more accessible can significantly boost an event’s popularity and attendance.
Event organisers are often not aware that they are creating barriers which are reducing the appeal of their events. Event management training and qualifications do not usually cover disabled accessibility and inclusion. Disabled people are so used to events not being accessible that most do not even try to attend, which means event organisers do not see the difficulties that disabled people face.
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Disabled people are sometimes subject to abuse, insults or physical violence because of their disability. The BuDS Fair4All Attitudes and Hate Crime project supports people affected by disability hate, helps them report it to the police if they wish, and campaigns to change attitudes and combat hostility toward disabled people.
Read MoreThe IAG team works tirelessly to produce easy to read, fact-checked and reliable articles about issues relevant to disabled people. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these have included weekly risk posts which break down the latest case, hospitalisation, death and vaccination statistics; analyses of Government policy, and scientific updates about the coronavirus. To read these posts, please see below or visit our Facebook page using the button below:
If you would like to volunteer for the IAG team as a researcher or writer, please visit our volunteering page to find out more.
The Fair4All Card is a secure, evidence based card that can be used by any disabled person to communicate the reasonable adjustments they need.
We created the scheme in August 2020 and have grown from offering around 12 reasonable adjustments to now offering over 40.
Find out more about the scheme below.
Covid infection levels in England have risen slightly but remain at historically low levels. The risk level remains Moderately Low, with 1 in every 1251 people in England infected.
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The election results for English council elections are still coming out, but we wanted to share with you a different perspective to the one you will see in the media.
The media report ‘the English council election results’ and give you all the statistics for those elections. But there are 317 councils in England, and only 136 (43%) had elections today. And, of those councils which did have elections, most of them only elected a third or half of their councillor seats. So, the English council election results do not tell the whole picture. In fact, these election results tell a very partial picture, because more than half of councils did not even have an election and few elected their whole council.
Carers Bucks has given up its £4 million council-funded contract to support carers in Buckinghamshire. In a shock move, Carers Bucks decided not to re-apply for the contract, which has been awarded to Mobilise Ltd instead. While no formal announcement has yet been made, many observers fear that the Carers Bucks charity may now close later in the year.
Read more: Carers Bucks Gives Up Bucks Council ContractAll main councils in England are funded by the Government to commission services to support carers in their area. For many years, Buckinghamshire Council has given a contract to Carers Bucks, a local registered charity, to provide those services. From 1 July 2026, however, a private health entrepreneur, Mobilise Ltd, will be supporting Bucks carers instead.
Details of the service that Mobilise will provide in Bucks is not yet clear. However, Mobilise has the carers support contract for many councils, including Milton Keynes, Luton & Bedford, and the service provided there is primarily online. Carers in those areas can apply online for ‘dynamic digital carers’ assessments’ which creates an online ‘personalised support plan’. This is claimed to allow social workers to ‘proactively track a carer’s needs’ and help them to receive ‘continuous tailored support’. This digital, online, model, if rolled out in Bucks, would be very different from that provided by Carers Bucks, which is based on more traditional face-to-face and group support for carers.
Under contract and employment law, Carers Bucks will transfer information, paid staff and some resources to Mobilise Ltd when they take over. However, it is not clear whether activities, groups and volunteers provided by Carers Bucks outside their council contract will survive after 30 June.
Carers Bucks have said that its CareFest events in June will go ahead as planned. Billed as a celebration of carer friendly communities, the events may now be a bittersweet marking of the end of Carers Bucks’ long history in the voluntary sector in Bucks.
Covid infection levels in England have fallen again to a new low. The risk level remains Moderately Low, with 1 in every 1597 people in England infected.
As regular readers will know, BuDS researchers use highly reliable data to calculate prevalence. We independently confirm our results using all other available data. As Covid-cautious people ourselves, we rely on these estimates just as much as we know our readers do.
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A major new research study has given scientists and doctors a better understanding of why cancers have been on the increase in the UK and many other countries for many years.
Cancers of all kinds have been increasing in adults in the UK and in other countries for many years. The reasons for this rise are unclear and there are many different theories among scientists and doctors.
It is well-known and proven that lifestyle risk factors like smoking, diet, alcohol use, exercise and obesity increase the risk of developing cancer. One theory is that people are simply becoming unhealthier, that is to say they are exposed to more of these lifestyle risk factors. If that is the case, say some scientists, growing un-healthiness might be a simple reason why cancer rates have gone up.
Published in the British Medical Journal for Oncology, the study tested the theory that growing un-healthiness explains why cancer rates are going up. The study looked specifically at younger (20 – 49 years old) adults in the UK between 2001 and 2019. It asked whether increases in lifestyle risk factors in these adults over this period explained why cancer rates increased in this group in that period. In other words, were these younger adults living less healthy lives over that period and that was why they were getting more cancers?
The researchers first worked out which cancers had become more common in adults aged 20 to 49 years old in the period from 2001 to 2019 – there were eleven. They then looked at how lifestyle risk factors were affecting this age group over the same period, and whether lifestyle risk factors affected more people or less. They then ran a statistical analysis to see if the rate of increase in cancers in matched up to the changes in lifestyle risk factors, taking into account other factors which might confuse the comparison.
The study showed that, apart from obesity, lifestyle risk factors were affecting the same number or fewer younger adults from 2001 to 2019. In other words, younger adults were not living un-healthier lives and exposing themselves to more lifestyle risks over that period, except that more of them were seriously overweight.
Cancers related to obesity did increase as expected. There was a clear link between more younger people being overweight and more younger adults getting cancer.
However, cancers not linked to obesity also increased in younger adults between 2001 to 2019, even though lifestyle risk factors affecting those adults did not increase in that period. This shows, according to the researchers, that changes in lifestyle risk factors do not explain most of the rise in cancers in younger adults between 2001 to 2019, although some of the rise was due to more younger adults being obese.
The study recommends that more research is done to explain why cancer rates are increasing in younger (20 – 49 years old) adults in the UK and in many other countries. The study also recommends that people should be encouraged and helped to avoid cancer lifestyle risk factors and in particular to maintain a healthy weight, to reduce their risk of developing cancer.
Whatever your age, your lifestyle has a lot to do with your risk of developing cancer. This study has identified obesity, or being seriously overweight, as having a proven link to being at higher risk of developing cancer. So, keeping your weight in a healthy range is important. You can find resources to help you manage your weight below.
While this study has shown that there is not such a clear connection between other lifestyle risks and the causes of cancer, it is an established medical fact that reducing your lifestyle risks will reduce your risk of developing cancer. You can find resources to help you reduce your cancer risks below.
This study looked at adults between 2001 and 2019, before the Covid pandemic, and therefore does not say anything about any link between Covid & cancer. Covid is still a new virus, and time is needed to assess and prove its effects. It will not be possible for some years to look back on the health records of people who caught Covid and show whether they experienced higher rates of cancer than people who did not catch Covid.
It is known that there are several biological means by which Covid might cause cancer, and it is not unusual for viruses to cause or be linked to cancers. For example, one study showed that Covid causes inflammation inside the body which can cause dormant cancers to become active and spread to other parts of the body. This study proved that cancer relapse rates were 1.5 times higher in cancer survivors who caught Covid compared to cancer survivors who did not catch Covid.
It is not yet possible to say that Covid causes cancer or affects cancer survival rates. However, avoiding Covid infections is a good thing to do in any case, as the virus is well-known to have many damaging impacts beyond the immediate acute symptoms.
Here are some resources and information which may help you. Click the button to visit them.
Covid infection levels in England have continued to fall and remain at the lowest levels recorded since 2020. The risk level remains Moderately Low, with 1 in every 1346 people in England infected.
This estimate is based on highly reliable data and is independently confirmed by all other available data, However, Covid has not vanished and people could still catch the virus in high-risk indoor places.
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BuDS Disability Service has welcomed the Parliamentary failure of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill today, Friday 24 April. This Bill is commonly known as the Assisted Dying or Assisted Suicide Bill. This failure at Westminster marked the defeat of all the Suicide Bills attempted to be rushed through British parliaments by lobbyists in the last two years.
Welcoming the Parliamentary failure, BuDS said:
“The failure of the Bill is good news for dying people, for the NHS and for Britain. We say this for two main reasons:
Much has been said about how this Bill has been ‘blocked’ by unscrupulous Parliamentary tactics, especially by ‘unelected Lords’. The reality is rather different. This Bill was not Government legislation, but a Private Members Bill (PMB). PMBs cannot be used to make complex and controversial legal reforms because they do not have enough Parliamentary time, even in the best of circumstances, to make such broad changes. The Terminally Ill Adults Bill was doomed to fail from the start by the incompetence of its sponsors and multimillionaire lobbyist backers, not by any Parliamentary blocking.
The passage of this Bill through Parliament has proved that the welfare of dying people and the protection of vulnerable people cannot be left to opaquely-funded, multimillionaire lobbying groups, especially those ideologically committed to suicide and euthanasia. A properly informed national conversation about end-of-life care and assisted suicide must happen before there is any future attempt at legislation. A Royal Commission or similar independent official body must now look at all the issues, consult widely, gather objective evidence and make recommendations. BuDS and other disabled-led organisations are ready to play their part in that conversation.
We are sorry to have to inform our community that the BuDDies Scheme at BuDS is currently on hold. Due to ongoing challenges facing charity funding across England, we have had to make the difficult decision to temporarily pause the scheme while we seek further funding.
We understand that this news may be disappointing, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused. Supporting your wellbeing remains extremely important to us, and we are committed to helping where we can during this pause.
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Covid infection levels in England have fallen to the lowest levels recorded since the pandemic began. The risk level is now Moderately Low, with 1 in every 1052 people in England infected. The risk from respiratory viruses, including Covid, in the community remains at its lowest ever level.
This estimate is based on highly reliable data, and the downward trend of infection levels is independently confirmed by all other available data. As a community of disabled and highly Covid-cautious people, BuDS is satisfied that Covid infection levels in England are indeed at unprecedented lows at present. However, Covid has not vanished and there is still a risk of catching the virus in high-risk indoor places.
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More Covid good news, as infection levels in England continue to fall to even lower levels. The risk level is still Moderate, with 1 in every 889 people in England infected. The risk from respiratory viruses, including Covid, in the community remains at its lowest ever level.
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