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IN TOUCH

TX:Ìý 02.01.2024Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý On this first In Touch of the year we’re going to be finding out what 2024 holds for the charity Guide Dogs and its relatively new CEO.Ìý I’ll be quizzing him about his plans in a moment.Ìý And the man who, since losing his sight, can no longer drive a car on the roads, but he can still build one.

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Clip

I’ve done some modifications to it, it’s got a massive turbo on it and it’s got large injections, which is why it smells of the fumes because it’s pumping loads of fuel in there and all it wants to do is go.

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White

More about how and why he did it later.

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But first, Andrew Lennox took over as CEO of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in September, we thought we’d give him a little time to get his feet under the table before putting some of the issues, you often raise with us, to him.Ìý And the start of the year seemed a good time to check out where he stands on a number of issues.

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Andrew Lennox, welcome to the programme.

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Lennox

Thank you very much, Peter, for having me and happy new year to you and to all the listeners.

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White

And to the association.Ìý You’re a business leader, you’ve spent the last 20 years or so working in health-related companies, including running a private hospital and being CEO of a project involving supported living and residential care for people with learning disabilities.Ìý I wonder what attracted you to this job, which, in some ways, has connections but is also very different.

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Lennox

The piece that attracts me most is I’m most interested in outcomes – how can I help as many people as I can.Ìý And if I look back at my past, Guide Dogs for me was a great attraction, it was one of the charities in my youth we supported, I remember many times being at Yafford Mill on the Isle of Wight, where I was born and raised, going along to Guide Dog events, watching the parades.Ìý But then, as I went through my career, and I got more involved in health and social care, I like to be able to see the outcome of making a difference to people’s lives.Ìý So, you’ll be able to come into the Guide Dogs’ world and support people with a visual impairment, I can see the outcome of the work that I’m doing, I can see those partnerships that we create every day, I can see the support that we give to the various groups of children and young people, the adults, all those outcome pieces that are most important to me are present here in Guide Dogs.

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White

But no mention in your CV of blind or partially sighted people or indeed dogs.

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Lennox

No but I’m actually on my own visual impairment journey.Ìý I actually have a diagnosis of double glaucoma – I got it when I was 34 and I’ve just turned 50 now.Ìý So, for me, there’s a personal element to it, as well as the element of outcomes and the people piece that is also important in the work that I do.

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White

Right.Ìý Can I start then with asking you a couple of the issues which crop up most often in our inbox?Ìý Top of the list is waiting lists – waiting times for guide dogs, particularly for replacement dogs.Ìý What are your plans for dealing with that and bringing down those waiting lists, often running into two years or more, which we know cause a lot of distress and difficulty to our listeners in maintaining independent lives?

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Lennox

Yes, and first of all, I just want to assure all your listeners that this is an issue that is very present across my desk and those of the senior team and everyone within the organisation really.Ìý So, as we look at the last recent years, obviously post-pandemic, the number of dogs we were able to introduce into training dropped quite significantly, causing the big spike in the waiting times.Ìý The great news is that in 2023, we are back up to the breeding levels that we saw back in 2017/18/19, so those 1400 puppies per annum.Ìý So, whilst those dogs will take time to grow and mature and become the guide dogs, the building blocks are already in place now to be able to resolve that waiting time.Ìý Now, that doesn’t, I understand, necessarily help someone who’s on the waiting list today but it’s just that assurance that those building blocks have been put in place.Ìý The trainers required to be able to train that number of guide dogs again is in place.

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White

Do you have a target for the end of this year, for example?

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Lennox

It’s very difficult because we’ve actually stated a time when we’re going to see the lists coming back down so all I can say is that we will start seeing the list coming down in 2024.Ìý At the moment, the average wait time is 16 months and we hope to improve on that.Ìý For me, the important thing is not speeding it through but is to have, what I would call, sticky partnerships for the future, having those quality partnerships rather than rushing dogs and people on the ready to train list through the process.

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White

But you would acknowledge that, you know, 16 months and there are some who’ve waited a good deal longer than that, but 16 months is still well over a year, which is far too long to have to wait, if you’ve already got a dog or had a dog?

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Lennox

I would completely agree with that, it’s far too long and it is not what we want in any way shape or form, so I hope that, in time, we will see the list and the time that people wait coming back down significantly.

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White

Now another thing which crops up a lot is that there’s been a move away, in recent years, from the idea of providing and training guide dogs as the organisation’s core activity, main activity, the feeling some guide dog owners have that involvement in other areas – rehab, working with children – that’s meant Guide Dogs spreading itself too thin, that’s what they would say.Ìý What do you feel about that?

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Lennox

The vision of Guide Dog partnerships remains the absolute core of what we do and the essence of what we do.Ìý We’ve actually been doing services for children since at least 2012, so it’s not something new that we’ve started in recent months or years, this has actually been part of our kind of DNA for some time.Ìý And the support that we give to adults is something that actually goes alongside the Guide Dog service.Ìý So, as people are on the ready to train list, they are supported by their habilitation specialist.Ìý So, those pieces that people might point to us and say are a dilution are actually, I think, part of our core offering where we’re trying to support people from cradle to grave, as it were, through all aspects of their life.

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White

But this still uses your resources.Ìý I mean I see from your accounts that your spending on child services was around 10 million, rehab and other adult services nearly 10 million but your title is still Guide Dogs.Ìý I mean quite apart from owners, surely most people who donate money think their contributing to a guide dog for a blind person, whereas, in fact, they’re contributing to quite a lot of other things.

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Lennox

Yeah, I can understand how people looking at our accounts might get that impression.Ìý Many of our services that we provide for rehabilitation and habilitation services, our children services and adults services, are actually funded through local authorities, so the actual impact on the donor pound, as it were, is not what you might think by just looking through our accounts, we actually have a number of contracts and support and actually help fund those services.Ìý So, it’s not quite as clearcut as the accounts might suggest.

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White

But it’s still costing you money?

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Lennox

It is costing us money but I would also say that the work that we’re doing with our dogs, we’re not taking any money away from those services at all, these are being done through additional support that we’ve got for those services.

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White

Right.Ìý On the issue of the things that you do and the range, again, the feeling is if you have a number of organisations all looking at the same broad areas – you know, you’ve got the RNIB, you’ve got the Pocklington Trust, you’ve got yourselves, there are one or two others doing a lot of things – some people say it would make more sense for those… the number of organisations to come down, maybe even amalgamations, which has been discussed in the past, rather than duplicating or triplicating or quadrupling efforts.Ìý As a CEO taking the broad view, how do you react to that idea?

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Lennox

It’s certainly an interesting one but actually I’d love to draw people’s attention to the vision impairment charity sector partnership, which actually involves all those organisations you’ve just mentioned where we get together on a regular basis to make sure we don’t do exactly as you describe – that we don’t get in each other’s way.Ìý Now that partnership has already produced some amazing outcomes.Ìý Announcements on buses came from the work collectively that we all did together to get the legislation changed to do that; the recent launch of the eyecare pathway for adults was also something that came out of the partnership.Ìý So, I’m not sure that there’s much more we could be doing as a sector than actually making sure we sit together and do not triplicate.

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White

Any other plans that you specifically have or changes you’d like to see implemented by the end of this year – this is your moment really to give us your vision of what you want to do?

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Lennox

Yeah, it’s a very simple vision in my mind.Ìý So, at the moment, the trustee board and myself and the exec team, we’re working through what our longer-term strategy for Guide Dogs – where do we see ourselves being in 10 or 15 years.Ìý So, whilst we might have three- or five-year kind of aims actually our world is changing quite dramatically.Ìý For me, my vision is a simple one – it’s to help as many people as we can.Ìý

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One of the experiences I had very early on in my guide dog journey, I was over at one of our sites speaking to the team, a gentleman came in, just started talking to me about his brother who had been quite ill with cancer and actually he was due to go to palliative care that day.Ìý So, we got two guide dogs out to give him an escort, a kind of guard of honour if you were, from his flat to the car for the last time he was going to be going anywhere.Ìý And he was telling me about how much watching the guide dogs, when he was trapped in his flat, not able to go anywhere because of his illness, watching the guide dogs and the guide dog owners training and how it brought a smile to his face and what a positive impact it had on him, which is why he was going to leave us a gift.Ìý Unfortunately, the gentleman passed just in mid-December.Ìý But I have in my mind now what I call my Ian test, that was the name of the gentleman in question and when I’m spending money with Guide Dogs now, I have to ask myself, could I look Ian in the eye and say that I was spending his money wisely and well because behind every single pound that gets donated there is this story and respecting that donor pound and what we do with it is a hugely important thing to me.Ìý

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As an organisation, we’re looking at how we can partner with technology to improve that guide dog owner and technology interface to really help as we go forward into the future, how can we really enhance that to use technology to better position a guide dog owner to be able to get the most out of their dog and also to get out into the communities and live the life that they choose to live.Ìý We’re working already, partnering with some of the largest tech companies, obviously… I’m sure I can’t name them on Radio 4 but reassured that we’re looking to make sure that we’re not just planning for today or tomorrow but we’re looking at a longer horizon, so that we can continue to be here and be relevant to the visually impaired community for many years to come.

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White

Well, a happy new year to you, Andrew Lennox, thank you very much.

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Now a question we often ask on this programme:Ìý How best to come to terms with unexpected sight loss.Ìý Things that you could once do very easily can suddenly seem nigh on impossible and plans that you’d made may have to change.Ìý But does it necessarily have to mean the end of a lifelong ambition?Ìý Well not for Roger Sharp it didn’t.Ìý

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Roger had always planned to rebuild a classic car and he wasn’t going to let the small matter of losing his sight stand in his way.Ìý Well, he’s now done it, so we sent our reporter, Fern Lulham, along to his home in West Sussex, where he lives with his partner, Debbie, to find out more about his sight loss experience and, of course, how he built a classic Ford Escort.

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Car revving

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Lulham

No, don’t worry, I’m not trying my hand at race car driving, not today anyway, instead I’ve come to meet Roger Sharp, a man fuelled by his passion for cars.

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Sharp

Ninety eighty-six, the engine.

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Lulham

Wow.

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Sharp

The car is 1973.Ìý I’ve done some modifications to it, it’s got a massive turbo on it, cam shafts, it’s got a large injection which is why it smells of the fumes because it’s pumping loads of fuel in there and all it wants to do is go.

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Lulham

As well as admiring Roger’s roaring race car, we also sat down for a cup of tea and a chat about how life had played out for him.

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Sharp

My life before I lost my sight always involved me doing something, making something, building something.Ìý My dad got me a little job in a garage, when I was about 14.Ìý Went to college and done City & Guilds in motor vehicle repairs.Ìý So, I then ended up going to America and becoming a diving instructor.Ìý Then I decided, actually I need to get myself a decent salary, so I decided, actually, I like the building, I’m interested in building, doing stuff and making stuff and constructing stuff.Ìý I always had a long-time target of retiring when I was 50 years old and that was what I set out to do from a child but I never ever thought that at the age of 47 I’d lose me eyesight.

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I’ve got those tools up there and I feel my way round them.Ìý Roughly know what sizes I want to get and how it feels in my fingers and work out which I need.Ìý It’s all doable. Alright, so that’s my screwdrivers.Ìý There’s over 35 years of tools in there.

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In 2011 it very first started and I was putting a new ceiling up in the bedroom, there was some old dust which came down from the void above the ceiling and I got it in my eyes.Ìý A few days went by and my eye started feeling a bit cloudy, just thought – oh, it’ll go, it’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright.Ìý And then slowly, slowly over time it sort of… you know, it got a bit worse.Ìý I was worried that if I went to a hospital they would say to Mr Sharp, you can’t drive no more and I’m thinking I can’t have that.Ìý Eventually, I did go to the hospital and then I saw a doctor, he said to me I need to go through this procedure, where they stuck a needle through the bottom of my eye.Ìý Eventually I lost my sight in right eye but I still had the sight in my left eye.Ìý And then by the end of November 22nd in 2016 I was here one Sunday morning with the dog, the lights went out and they never came back on.

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Fortunately, with that car it’s all been sort of hand tools and stuff like that, we haven’t used a lot of power tools on it apart from a drill and stuff, it’s all been nuts and bolts and all that kind of gear.

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I lost my eyesight completely that Sunday.Ìý I went back to the hospital.Ìý They sat me and they said – Well, we think we’ve done what we can for you and that’s it.Ìý And I thought, what do you mean you’ve done what you can for me, I can’t see, I’m 47 years old and I’m now left in this position.Ìý Between Debs, a friend of mine and his partner, they got me an appointment in the Queens Square in London, which is a brain hospital with a guy called Gordon Plant.Ìý He had a little penlight and he went round to the side of my eye and he shone it in there and he said – Has anybody ever told you, your optic nerve’s quite pale?Ìý And I said – No.Ìý He said – Well they are.Ìý And I thought brilliant, he’s going to give me a pill and it’s all going to be fine in a couple of days, lovely, thank god for that.Ìý He says – It’s not quite as simple Mr Sharp.Ìý He said – If your optic nerves get starved of oxygenated blood for 10 minutes – he goes – there’s normally problems.Ìý About a week later he phoned me up.Ìý Right – he said – we’ve got to the bottom of what’s going on, you’ve had a TIA, a mini stroke.Ìý I said – You what?Ìý He said – Lots of people have strokes, they don’t even know they’ve had them. ÌýI just think that things may have been so much different if just someone had listened to what was going on, listened to the person and I firmly believe that people aren’t listened to.Ìý There was no help.Ìý I needed help.Ìý I asked for help and there was no help and that is the most upsetting thing about it all.

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Inside the boot the fuel tank and it’s all polished aluminium, the battery’s in the back instead of front because the engine takes up so much room in the front.Ìý And then the colour of the car is… it’s called ermine white.Ìý I’ve never actually seen the car but I’ve been told by people that do know about cars that it is beautiful.

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Lulham

How does that feel when they say that to you?

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Sharp

If anything, it’s disappointing, I can’t drive it, I want to drive it and like I’ve done all this work and all this effort and all this financial, as well, money, so I’ve done it and I wanted to show it.Ìý It’s worth it now, yeah, because I’ve ticked the box.

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Lulham

You’ve done it.

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Sharp

I’ve done it, yeah.Ìý

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Lulham

So, I guess the million-dollar question is how did you adapt to building a car without your sight?

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Sharp

Well, when I was building the car, I had a CE approved structural steel workshop and what I would do is I would have a box of job cards and I would fold cardboard up into shapes, cut shapes, bend, fold, whatever, into shapes that I needed to make various mounts, brackets and stuff.Ìý I would ask the guys in the workshop to make me those mounts and then once they’d made them, I would feel them to make sure they were all sound and all smooth and all nice and how I wanted.Ìý Memory, just… okay if I can do that there, I know that’s going to come down there, back to basics, simple is best.

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I suppose, to a certain degree, I am proud of myself but I don’t really think anything more than that really because it’s just what I’ve always done, I just want to do what Roger Sharp wants to do in his own little way and just let me get on with it.

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Car revving and beeping

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White

Roger Sharp, not letting anything stand in his way.Ìý Our reporter was Fern Lulham.

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We stay with cars but in a very different context next week.Ìý As In Touch enters its 64th year – oh yes really – some subjects just don’t go away and one is the extreme irritant to many visually impaired people – cars parked on pavements.Ìý Despite bitter complaints and some local bylaws, more often ignored than observed, the problem doesn’t go away but it seems some changes are afoot, especially in Scotland.Ìý

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We want to hear your experiences of navigating your way around cars.Ìý You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk, leave voice messages on 0161 8361338 and find our website on bbc.co.uk/intouch.Ìý

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From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings, goodbye.