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This commentary takes the article, “Participation of adults with learning disabilities in the 2015 United Kingdom General Election”, as a jumping-off point for considering a tension between the aim of full and equal equality for all people with disabilities as set out in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and more traditional beliefs, that on occasion, it is necessary to deny legal autonomy of men and women with intellectual disabilities in order to protect them. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This issue is explored by reviewing the multiple and often conflicting ways in which disability and intellectual disability are conceptualised.

Given the multiple and contradictory ways in which both disability and intellectual disability are understood, any discussion of the rights of persons with disabilities is going to be highly problematic.

Equal recognition before the law and the presumption that all persons with intellectual disabilities can – with support – make autonomous decisions could be treated as an empirical question.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain what efforts Adult Safeguarding Leads (ASLs), generic advocates, and Independent Mental Capacity Advocates are making to involve service users in decisions about protective measures, and to investigate whether the Adult Safeguarding service is delivering outcomes, which are valued by its users.

Semi-structured interviews with a sample of key stakeholders.

ASLs are making efforts to involve service users in the complex and demanding process of safeguarding. These efforts, however, are shaped by their understandings of the difference between “residential” and “community” settings.

The study is based in a single County Council, albeit in a large county, and involves a limited number of service users.

Clarification is needed of what it may mean to adopt a person-centred approach to adult safeguarding, and the responsibilities of ASLs when individuals with capacity to make decisions about this aspect of their lives are unwilling to engage with the safeguarding process.

The findings improve the understanding of how ASLs understand their responsibilities towards the users of their services and endeavour to involve them in the adult safeguarding process. Based on this understanding, those with responsibility for managing Adult Safeguarding services should be better able to support improvements in professional practice.

This paper argues that by shackling the future of work to a vision of full employment, alternative futures are closed off. At present, employment creation is seen as the sole route out of poverty. Here, however, we reveal that a complementary additional pathway is to help people to help themselves and each other. To show this, evidence from a survey of 400 households in deprived neighbourhoods of Southampton and Sheffield is reported. This reveals that besides creating job opportunities, measures that directly empower people to improve their circumstances could be a useful complementary initiative to combat social exclusion and open up new futures for work that are currently closed off.