Don't Wait for an Accessibility Act

For more than 30 years, disability discrimination law has largely been built around individual rights and reasonable adjustments. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to anticipate barriers and make reasonable adjustments. But enforcement still depends heavily on disabled people identifying a problem, challenging the organisation, and being prepared to litigate.

The emerging question is whether that's enough.

For the stadiums, theatres, museums, visitor attractions, sports organisations, ticketing businesses and entertainment companies I work with, I think there's a more useful question:

If the regulatory direction is changing, what would the very best organisations start doing now?

Two developments point in the same direction

The Parliamentary petition, published on 17 September, calls for free arbitration before court proceedings in disputes about inaccessible venues. It identifies a genuine problem. A disabled person may encounter a barrier affecting hundreds or thousands of other people. But if the organisation doesn't resolve it, enforcement can still depend upon that individual taking legal action.

The proposed Accessibility Act goes considerably further. Disability Rights UK and an expert working group including Professor Anna Lawson and Catherine Casserley are arguing for a new statutory framework involving accessibility standards, accessibility plans, monitoring and stronger systemic enforcement.

These are different proposals. One is principally about making disputes easier to resolve. The other asks whether we should become less dependent upon individual disputes in the first place. But they have something important in common: both question whether accessibility should continue to depend so heavily upon individual disabled people enforcing their rights.

From “reasonable” towards “required”

This could eventually produce a significant change for businesses. The Equality Act deliberately uses the concept of reasonableness. That flexibility is valuable. What's reasonable for a 90,000-seat stadium may be different from what's reasonable for a small independent theatre. But flexibility also creates uncertainty. Businesses develop different policies. Disabled customers encounter different systems. And ultimately the courts determine where the boundary lies.

Accessibility standards could change part of that conversation. Instead of asking “Would this adjustment be reasonable?” businesses may increasingly have to ask “What does the accessibility standard require?”

That wouldn't necessarily replace the reasonable-adjustments duty. But it could provide a much clearer baseline underneath it. For businesses, that could actually be helpful. Clear standards can provide greater certainty about what good looks like.

The best businesses shouldn't wait

There's no Accessibility Act currently before Parliament. The new petition doesn't change the law. Nobody should redesign their compliance programme because legislation is supposedly arriving next year. We simply don't know that.

But there's a difference between predicting legislation and recognising direction of travel.

The organisations I see doing accessibility particularly well already behave differently from those treating it primarily as a compliance exercise. They don't wait for somebody to complain before asking whether something works. They test it. They measure it. They involve disabled customers. And they treat accessibility failures as useful operational information.

That's exactly the direction in which the wider regulatory conversation appears to be moving.

The full article walks through seven practical steps to future-proof your operation, the Operational Accessibility Framework™ at RIBA Stage 6 and Stage 7, how access technology is changing the picture, and the commercial opportunity in getting this right.