Disabled People’s Voice Becomes No More Than A Whisper – The Danger of The Equality Bill

The Government has published a single Equality Bill for the UK. If passed, this will bring disability, gender, race and other strands of discrimination within one piece of legislation. The proposals for the Bill also include some major changes to disability discrimination law but not necessarily for the better.

For many disabled people, the Equality Bill is oppressive and demeaning to disabled people. Our voice is lost in the confused and incoherent message caused by the integration of equality under one heading. What the Equality Bill fails to recognise is that whilst the strands of equality have a common aim, they are all very different and require many different approaches. The understanding of discrimination on the grounds of race or gender is far more known in the public domain than that of disability and under the Equality Bill, we have a real danger of the disabled people’s voice becoming little more than a whisper.

It has taken many campaigners many years to get where we are today with disability discrimination and changes have been slow to come. I, like many, doubt that I will see true equality for disabled people in my lifetime but I am determined to do all that I can to raise inclusion for all. The UK was very much forced to bring in the DDA but it has its limitations i.e. a requirement to make buildings accessible, but there was a more than liberal get-out clause and even more liberal lead-in times which allowed business managers to skirt around the issues. There has been little decisive action taken against offenders and we are still in a position whereby large areas of goods and services are unavailable to disabled people - some by direct discrimination i.e. non-accessible buildings and others by indirect discrimination such as no dropped kerbs etc.

The proposed Equality Bill attempts to level the playing field for all inequalities but somewhat leads to inconsistencies and there are ‘priority battles’ that have not been properly ironed out. The Equality Bill fails to address the many areas that disability reform requires and in doing so can only push back disabled equality rather than move it forward.

Equality Bill 2009 & the Existence of Inequality

On 27th April this year, the current Government released the Equality Bill 2009 with the intention of simplifying and harmonizing existing legislation such as the Disability Discrimination Act, Race Relations Act, the Sex Discrimination Act, the Equality Act 2006 and many other anti-discrimination legislation.

With so much equality legislation in force, it is sad to see that we still have an increase in terms of actual inequality.

Ronald Dworkin, a political theorist, based his theory of equality on the principle that “every person is entitled to equal concern and respect in the design of the structure of society” and “real equality of opportunity can only be measured by its success in creating equality of outcome”.

He further argues that if everyone, regardless of physical and mental ability, are to have genuine equal opportunities, then an equal opportunity must exist for all participants to end the race at the same time whether they need more considered or continued support or not.

The Disability Discrimination Act is currently the only equality legislation that requires anyone to invest financially into real equality of opportunity but this in reality is minimal as the Act states that only “reasonable” changes can be expected at a “proportionate” cost.

For many employers and service providers accessibility is considered low down on their list of priorities and even the simplest of adaptations such as ramps, induction loops etc are rarely considered.

Only time will tell whether the new Equality Bill will make significant changes to providing genuine equality of opportunity to people with disabilities but it is my belief that until fundamental changes are made to people’s perception of disability, we will not see true equality.