It’s not really what we want to encourage, the stigma that disabled people are potential lawsuits, but with the rising litigiousness of the disability lobby in this country that is where things are going.
Last year the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) announced that it was suing Debenhams for the failure of one of its stores to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for people in wheelchairs. This week the BBC reported that the Arcadia group, one of the UK's largest clothing retailers, is facing legal action over the inaccessibility of one of its stores, a branch of Burton in Stafford. The DRC says it has evidence that 40% of the group's shops – which include Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins, Wallis, Burton and Evans – have barriers that make it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to shop there.
The argument, which depends on rather inflated figures about the number of disabled people in Britain, is that with disabled people’s spending power set at £80 billion, all retailers should improve access to their stores in order to take the profits. If this truly were the case, though, surely savvy retailers would capitalise on the supposedly untapped market. By using the disabled spending argument, the DRC’s reasonableness is confounded by its own self-generated paradox: if you do not make money out of disabled people, disabled people will make money out of you.
The requirement of ‘reasonable adjustments’ – providers of goods, services and facilities have legal responsibilities not to discriminate against disabled people – is enshrined in the Disability Discrimination Act. What this means is that companies, public sector and social care agencies have legal duties to meet the additional needs of people with disabilities. In due course this will extend to a legal requirement of inclusive design of products, services and environments. Yet making such a process compulsory forces designers, manufacturers and service providers to make unreasonable adjustments. The lower the chance of using a benefit, the weaker is the case for having it: scarcity is a consideration as well as dignity.
Let’s look at some other examples of the same sort of trend:
Consumer products The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit calls for inclusive design of consumer products, such as ‘a big-button phone selling as a mainstream product’. Since it is risible to suggest that there is a great demand for such products, to force all manufacturers to account for miniscule markets in their product menus is unjust. Conversely, in a free market, the canny entrepreneur would be the one who identifies such a niche and chooses to provide the product or service.
Construction The Strategy Unit calls for ‘accessibility audits of buildings to improve mobility for everyone from wheelchair users to mothers pushing prams’. In old buildings, or for small companies with tight budgets, making such changes mandatory could be enough to put the owners into administration. What’s more, statutory changes artificially create a captive market that drives up construction costs.
Infrastructures The DRC attacks the way that the infrastructure is organised, managed and used by the public. For instance, signs in hospitals to ‘haematology’ are of little help to people with learning disabilities seeking the blood-testing clinic. This denies some people the chance of leading independent lives, and the opportunity to share in the wider community. Among other things, this vastly exaggerates the inconvenience of not being able to read a sign – any confused person (and we have all been confused in hospitals) will simply ask a member of staff.
The difficulty with all these legal apparatuses is the hazard they pose to public goodwill. Bear in mind that the entire apparatus of charitable giving and charitable service would be unintelligible if public attitudes were as harsh and archaic as government and commentators and pressure groups would have us believe. At the same time, you cannot coerce people into compassion and trying to do so often activates greater tensions, even creating tensions that did not previously exist. The DRC demands that we care and help. It demands statutory adjustments without us being able to call them what they are, special privileges. It demands that we see disabled people as independent even if they are not. It is screaming at us to care and not care, to help and not help, and all the while it holds the gun of the law to society’s head.