Blue Badge argie-bargie

Could the Baywatch campaign be supporting and advocating discrimination against disabled people, Helen Dolphin asks

For nearly ten years Disability Now magazine along with Mobilise and the British Polio Fellowship have run the Baywatch campaign. Its aim being to encourage supermarkets to issue parking tickets to non Blue Badge holders parking in disabled bays. The campaign has been a great success and now most supermarkets employ private parking companies to manage their car parks and parking abuse has been reduced.

However, I was somewhat surprised to read recently on a number of parking discussion forums and on the Disability Now website that not everyone supports the aims of Baywatch and some people even questioned whether or not it is lawful for the Blue Badge scheme to be used in private car parks. One person even went as far as to say: “To limit disabled spaces to Blue Badge holders is a breach of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) because it discriminates against disabled people who do not have a Blue Badge.” Another user wrote that by running Baywatch we are “in effect supporting and advocating discrimination against people with disabilities”.
These are really quite damning criticisms and if they were true then it would pretty much prevent car park operators from keeping their disabled bays free from abuse and the work of Baywatch would be redundant.

Will Bee who works as a disability consultant and led on transport issues for the Disability Rights Commission says the views of the forum users are misguided. “They are correct that operators of car parks are under no obligation to recognise the Blue Badge but many choose to do so in order to meet their obligations under the Equality Act 2010 (Disability Discrimination Act up until 30 September).

So car park operators are not operating an “unlawful scheme”. They are in fact meeting their obligations under the Equality Act which states that providers of services to the public are required to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to remove barriers which may discriminate against disabled people. Therefore where a supermarket provides a car park, “reasonable adjustments” to prevent discrimination are likely to include parking spaces near to the entrance for those disabled people whose mobility is impaired to the degree that it would otherwise be difficult for them to access the store.

However, another of the criticisms from the forum users is that a Blue Badge is not issued to all disabled people so by asking for a Blue Badge this is discrimination. Will Bee says that this is in fact incorrect. “A reasonable adjustment is intended to remove barriers which discriminate against disabled people. But not all disabled people face the same barriers. It is those people who have mobility problems who need dedicated parking provision. Parking operators need a way to identify those people who need the spaces. The Blue Badge is a long-standing and well respected national scheme to identify disabled people who need special parking provision. It would appear to be entirely reasonable for car park operators to adopt it as the way to decide who should have access to the dedicated parking spaces.”

Undoubtedly there are some disabled people who do not qualify for a Blue Badge who have mobility problems. However, Will Bee does not think they would be successful if they mounted a claim for disability discrimination by a car park operator which limited access to its accessible spaces to Blue Badge holders. “They would have to convince the Court that by adopting the scheme the car park operator was behaving unreasonably. I find it difficult to conceive that such an action would succeed.”

Car park operators are also at risk of an Equality Act claim if they don’t discourage abuse of the accessible spaces. This means that they need to ensure that the spaces are only used by people who need them. So it seems the work of Baywatch is not redundant but more important than ever in ensuring supermarkets provide accessible bays and employ parking companies to monitor them.