Leonard Cheshire's challenge allergy

Activist and advocate for disability rights Professor Peter Beresford recounts how internal emails reflect a negative attitude to criticism of human rights failures

The last time I saw disability rights activist and Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD) residential service user Doug Paulley, we were both giving oral evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights and Independent Living, earlier this year. He provided powerful evidence of the barriers in the way of both human rights and independent living that can face disabled people living in residential services.

But Doug has also  featured in these pages in his own right before when I wrote about longstanding problems he had been having with LCD (disabilitynow.org.uk/latest-news2/news-focus/more-news-focus/further-discomfort-for-leonard-cheshire).

Doug had been found by a local inquiry to have suffered “institutional abuse” by senior managers at LCD. Following a complaint from Doug, the Information Commissioner found Leonard Cheshire to be in breach of the Data Protection Act for failing to “respond adequately to a request for access to information from one of its service users”. Doug was found to have been “denied the opportunity of correcting what may be inaccurate or misleading personal data about him”.

Doug has now had further internal emails about him released by LCD following the judgement in his favour by the Information Commissioner. But what is interesting about them is that they reveal a focus that is no longer restricted to Doug, but which has now switched to me!!

These include the following comments from managers relating to me and the Disability Now article referred to above: “Yes I have seen it. It is by Peter Beresford and is in similar vein to Private Eye... The advice is that there is not much point challenging Disability Now but we could pick it up with Brunel University who are his employer

“...this chap [PB] is impossible - the premise of his question reveals an innate bias. Unfortunately LCD has nothing to gain in assisting him in his article”.

Now let’s look a little more closely at what I am being accused of here. Like Private Eye I reported accurately the Information Commissioner’s judgement against LCD and in favour of Doug Paulley. I am found guilty in absentia of “innate bias” but my repeated request to LCD for their side of the story in the interests of accuracy and balance were ignored on the basis that LCD felt it “had nothing to gain in assisting [me]”. Finally there is the suggestion that while best to leave Disability Now alone, it might be worth having a go at Peter through his employer. I’ve heard no more of this and I am wondering what my offence might have been – telling the truth? Reporting the public judgment of an independent official?

What is really worrying here is that it is as if LCD has completely lost the plot. It seems to have forgotten that it is a registered charity with a public commitment to securing the human rights of disabled people. Instead it seems to have seen itself as part of a shady politicized underworld of denial, concealment and failure to uphold disabled people’s rights, prepared to attack any independent voice that it sees as serving disabled people’s rather than its interests. Time it relearned the word “accountability” and let’s hope its new CEO will be able to take it forward in that task.