A reform named after people

This is a historic reform, accompanied by the world of associations, which marks the passage from welfarism to the enhancement of the person with disabilities and which profoundly innovates the system of assessments, supports, and protections, overcoming the bureaucratic rigidity that distinguishes it.
With the implementing decrees of Delegated Law No. 227 of 2021, which is the subject of this Guide, we truly make the person with disabilities the protagonist and recognise the centrality of his or her desires, preferences, and needs, as envisaged by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

It is a concrete change that affects the lives of millions of people and their families. The heart of the reform, as I have said many times, is the Life Project, an instrument supported by the project budget that guarantees a complete and integrated care of the person with disabilities, according to a unitary vision that holds together all aspects of daily life.

Today, persons in need of services find themselves having to 'knock on the doors' of the various agencies that separately manage the social, health, rehabilitation, educational, and so on. With the 'Life Project' the perspective will be reversed and all the competent bodies will have to coordinate with each other and unite around the person with disabilities, the protagonist of the Multidimensional Assessment Unit, immediately activating the necessary services and measures.
The reform also simplifies the preliminary stage of disability assessment, the so-called basic assessment, identifying a single assessor, reunifying existing procedures and eliminating revisability visits, often a humiliation for persons with disabilities and their families, thanks to a certificate that will normally be of unlimited duration.

In January 2025, the experimentation of the new regulations will start in nine Italian provinces (Brescia, Catanzaro, Florence, Forlì-Cesena, Frosinone, Perugia, Salerno, Sassari and Trieste) and the training of the institutions involved will soon begin. In keeping with the UN Convention, the decree on the Life Project also introduces the principle of reasonable accommodation and updates the language on disability, abolishing words such as handicapped and handicapped person from ordinary laws, to finally speak of persons with disabilities.
On the level of protection, we upgrade the public administrations to guarantee citizens accessibility to the spaces and services of the institutions and we establish the National Guarantor of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an independent guarantee body that will supervise, collect reports, and propose measures or reasonable accommodations suitable for overcoming the criticalities encountered.

These are reforms that present us with a great challenge, but the change has begun: even more courage is now needed from everyone to support this journey. To see in each person their potential and not their limitations.
Our lighthouse is the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and from it the promotion of the right of everyone to a full and participated life from the civil, social, political and cultural point of view.