Milestones on a long road

Following a speech in the House of Lords in a debate on disability rights, disabled crossbench peer Lord Low of Dalston reflects on one legislative milestone

Lord [Alf] Morris’s Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, which was enacted in 1970, did two things. It was important symbolically because it constituted a recognition of disabled people as a constituency who merited public attention and of provision for them as an area of public policy that needed to be developed.

Disabled people were getting quite restive in the 60s – that was when DIG (the Disablement Income Group) was founded, campaigning strongly for better benefits – and Alf’s act was widely seen as a response from society to this mounting clamour for attention. But it wasn’t actually providing what disabled people were clamouring for at the time, which was better financial support.

Alf’s act was mainly about local authority provision, giving powers to local authorities to provide more in the way of services. But it wasn’t about rights. It laid duties on local authorities to provide services, though, as we saw over time, these duties were somewhat porous and subsequent legislation had to be enacted to tighten up the duties. This was an act about duties to provide services and rights didn’t really enter into it, though, of course, duties implied rights.

One of the big things that’s coming up now in the continuing discussion on disability rights is that local authorities are actually only meeting the needs of those people with the highest levels of support. Getting on for four-fifths of local authorities are only meeting the requirements of those whose needs are classified either as critical or substantial.

The emphasis on rights only began, not at the beginning of the 70s, but at the end of the 70s, when they set up the Committee on Restrictions Against Disabled People which, in 1981, came up with recommendations for anti-discrimination legislation. And that fired the starting gun for disabled people to get rights in legislation – which reached its first milestone in 1995 with the Disability Discrimination Act.

There’s always a big time lag between a need being demonstrated and persuading the politicians to take action. It took 13 or 14 years in the case of anti-discrimination legislation and, I think, nine or ten bills, all abortive attempts in Parliament. So Alf started with services, and the spotlight shifted to rights beginning in the early 80s with the first milestone being reached in 1995. There’s a continuing campaign to expand the scope of anti-discrimination legislation and that campaign goes on.

• Lord Low was talking to Ian Macrae