Access beyond the ghettos of accessible housing

From time to time, the media, business, governments, elected members and charities acknowledge how inaccessible most of the traditional high streets are across the UK for disabled people with particular mobility and access needs.  Real equality means that disabled people who, say, use wheelchairs and are visiting a place like Dalkeith in Midlothian should be able to know that they can visit, for example, Ladbrokes in South Street and place a bet [they can – it has ramped access].

While dropping in to the High Street is often an unthinking event for non-disabled people, so too is the decision to drop in unannounced on a friend or relative who lives, say, just a few miles away and whose company you enjoy.  Such is the stuff of life for non-disabled people.  Place a bet on the Grand National at Ladbrokes, grab a few beers from Lidl, and then zip round to watch your horse come in last on the large-screen tv at your friend’s house.

We know that all can gain equal access to Ladbrokes and bet the house on the 3.30 race at Newmarket.  What we also know is that the vast majority of houses built across Midlothian [old and new] and the rest of the UK are not visitable by disabled people who use a wheelchair.  Too many, way too many, still have stepped access, even when the building site was relatively flat [architects and developers like to make statements at entrances to homes and steps can be part of such ‘statements’].  Too many still have inadequate door opening widths, meaning entrance over the few which have level, no-step, access, can mean anything from getting stuck, grazed knuckles, or getting marooned in the hallway because there is no turning space and the doors leading into the rest of the house open the wrong way.

Even if a person is lucky enough to get into the lounge of their friend’s house, all the while making sure the blood from their knuckles is not dripping on the on-trend off-white fitted carpet, the space standards used in building most homes are so minimalist that while you have been lucky enough to get into their lounge, you can’t move around the lounge. 

We could go on and on, describing how it is most unlikely that you can get into the kitchen to raid his or her fridge for more beers once the Lidl shop has drowned the sorrows of the horse coming in last.  Even in those rare occasions where you have been lucky enough to obliterate the memory of that rash bet, being able to get to and use the toilet is likely to take as long as your horse did to get round Aintree, and with no guarantee that you will get over the last hurdle and into the toilet.

How did we get here ?

Two basic approaches used by governments for decades now explain where we are and why.

Firstly, governments have focused on the homes disabled people live in and trying to improve basic standards of accessibility to and in them.  Current standards while not perfect work after a fashion for most disabled people.

Secondly, when it comes to housing built for the majority of the population who are non-disabled people, builders and developers have been encouraged – rarely forced – through regulations and guidance to ensure that all new homes built since the 1990’s are visitable by disabled people.  Given the majority of housing built since 1979 has been private sector for the owner-occupied market, the consequence of these approaches is that we have created ghettos in terms of where disabled people can expect to live and, by default, exclude disabled people from not only being able to live in the vast bulk of housing built, but also excluded from being able to visit and socialise with people living in the vast bulk of housing built.

Excluding disabled people from being able to visit and engage socially with friends, family and neighbours through enabling the building of unvisitable housing is a breach of human rights.  Government needs to recognise this and start to work with disabled people in getting planners, builders and developers to stop ghettoising the lives of disabled people.

If the people with particular housing needs were people of colour [POC] and housing policy led to POC only being able to visit other POC, society would erupt in a storm of protest at such racist, segregationist and discriminatory policies.  If the people with particular housing needs were Catholics and housing policy led to Catholics only being able to visit other Catholic people while Protestant people could visit any and all other people, society would rightly storm Parliament and demand an end to sectarianism in housing policy and discrimination against Catholic people because of their particular faith.