Trevor Phillips: a man with a mission

Trevor Phillips is not afraid of courting controversy, a useful trait to have as chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. He talks to Katharine Quarmby about his new role.

Trevor Phillips bounds into his headquarters at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), smiling. His offices are so new that plastic still covers some carpet and photographs chronicling the American civil rights struggle are waiting to be hung in the chairman’s office. But Mr Phillips and the Commission are unequivocally ready for business.

I begin by asking him whether he is comfortable being the champion of disabled people. He smiles. “It feels perfectly fine to me.” But he says the role of the commission is “not to speak for groups but let their voices be heard”.

We discuss the asymmetrical model of the EHRC – the disability committee being the only strand-specific one in the EHRC. He says: “I wasn’t thrilled by the idea, when I first heard of it.” But he has become less uncomfortable with it as his knowledge of the “nature of inequality for disabled people” has grown.

“Disabled people have two sources of discrimination: one is other people, but the other is the world as it is constructed by mankind and the latter is not really true for the other dimensions”.

He is irritated when I ask why the legal strategy is still at an interim stage. “It is interim because I think that we have to consult more widely, but there are some pretty clear rules about how we will approach things and we have set out eight criteria by which we will judge cases.” He denies the charge that each strand, which he prefers to call “dimensions”, may have to wait in line for its chance to challenge the law, but does say that the new work areas, such as faith and age, “clearly have some catching up to do” and pledges that the commission will put energy into doing so.

Then he moves on to the case of Katie Thorpe. “First of all there are some obvious questions about Katie’s human rights, where are they in this discussion, and to what extent have they been respected, and this would be her right to selfdetermination, her physical integrity, and who is listening to her. Someone would have to demonstrate that she has no voice to be heard and I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that.

heard, it should be loudest in this debate and we will, as a matter of human rights, want to ensure that everybody concerned – family, courts, media – are seized of that. But what has worried me most is the invasion of her privacy. People have been saying things about a 15-year-old child that you wouldn’t dream of saying about another 15-year-old child and I find that pretty grotesque.”

He warns: “One thing you can be sure about; we will make sure we are in a position, if nobody else is, to fight for that kind of talking about this child not to recur, whether it is through the courts, or the Press Complaints Commission.”

And he remarks that the press “took away her humanity, talked about her as an object, and that cannot be right”.

Lastly, I ask him about hate crime. “The cutting edge of hate crime seems to be hate crime against people with learning disabilities. And what makes that more vile is that we excuse it. People think it is not nice, but shouldn’t this person be kept out of harm’s way?

We need to say that disabled people should be allowed to get on with their lives in the same way as anybody else and nobody should question that.”