Comment :
Disability Discrimination in the Public Sector
(July 2007)
Disability Law Service is a national charity which has been providing a specialist legal service for disabled adults and children for the last 30 years. They also give advice to other organisations and professionals working with disabled people. Their legal team challenge discriminatory practices and decisions in employment, community care, welfare benefits, public services, higher and further education through judicial reviews, appeals procedures, representation in tribunals and county courts. Their training courses for front line advisors and advocates are key to raising awareness of disability discrimination in general. Jocelyn Murphy, Head of Legal Services at DLS, talks about her work:
With the creation of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, the Disability Rights Commission has invited us to join in their "transfer of skills" project to promote and offer legal support on disability rights of service users and also students in further and higher education, particularly in the South East Region of England. There are 13 other agencies working locally and regionally throughout England.
I head the Disability Discrimination Team at DLS and am the designated Disability Rights Worker in the DRC project with a national and strategic dimension to the promotional work, as well as the regional casework required. We have challenged decisions made by Highways Departments concerning policies on the allocation and siting of disabled parking bays; failure by Housing Services to supply British Sign Language interpretation for Deaf homeless persons; refusal of an NHS dentist to register a patient with HIV; restaurants refusing to serve wheelchair users or denying access to guide dogs; discos doing the same by failing to undertake risk assessments or have evacuation policies for disabled customers.
I have given Disability Discrimination seminars to housing lawyers at Shelter head office; to benefit advisors of Child Poverty Action Group; run a workshop for prison staff on behalf of the Prison Reform Trust; given presentations to Public Lawyers' group on enforcement of the Disability Discrimination Act; to public authorities at a conference on Disability Equality at Work; promoted access by Deaf patients to health services as a Patient's Forum representative on Lambeth PCT consultation group.
From 4 December 2006, the DDA 2005 imposed further duties on public authorities with the aim of tackling systemic discrimination, ensuring that public authorities build disability equality into everything they do.
Authorities now have to produce Disability Equality Schemes, consult with disabled constituents, adjust policies which have unreasonably adverse consequences for disabled people which are disproportionate to whatever legitimate aims they are trying achieve. This arguably widens the scope for judicial review of discriminatory policy decisions.
Furthermore, the new Act clarifies the position of public bodies when performing certain of their public functions previously excluded, e.g. planning decisions. They now have to take positive steps to ensure that disabled people can benefit from those functions. For example, before December 2006, Tribunals had to ensure physical accessibility on site, now, they should also consider whether tribunal staff should be trained to assist disabled users under the Manual Handling Regulations and if not, why not.
There are 8.5 million disabled people in Britain. – that's one in seven of the population. Is the Public Sector ready for them?
If you would like more information about the workshops provided by DLS, contact Jocelyn Murphy.