The Blame Game

We all unexpectedly mess up or fail. Most of us want to learn from that and it's generally a good idea to try to look at a situation in the round and without emotion. For me that involves being sure of the facts to get the full picture and then to take it apart. That's conditioning from years of legal training, and plenty of practice at getting it wrong.

In my practice recently, one of the seasonal themes raises a number of challenges in a commercial context where there are overlapping corporate and individual relationships. Lots of multi-layered large events bring all of this into sharp relief.

The fact which starts this discussion is that a disabled person has a bad experience at a venue or event to the extent that it creates a complaint which might go legal.

It's surprising how often the first thing that happens at ground level is that someone points the finger at someone else. The venue says it was the promoter's problem. The promoter says it was the venue's problem. The ticketing platform says it just sells tickets. The home club says it cannot be held responsible for what happens at another club's ground.

Not only is that response disappointingly predictable, it's not the customer's problem. They don't care whose fault it is, they just want it sorting. I think that's fair enough, and so does the Equality Act 2010.

The Act doesn't care how many parties are in your supply chain, and won't accept “it was someone else's responsibility” as a defence. Every organisation that provides a service to the public carries its own legal obligations, regardless of who else is involved.

The question of who is responsible when access provisions fail is not academic. It determines who gets sued, who pays compensation, and who spends the next two years plus managing a discrimination claim through the courts. If you don't have the answer the courts will keep going until they find one, with considerable public exposure and financial risk. Getting it right from the start needn't be as difficult as you might think.

Here are a few real world case studies which illustrate the issues and what might be done about them.

Scenario One: A Disabled Football Fan at an Away Ground

A disabled football supporter buys a ticket for an away fixture through their home club. They travel to the away ground and find there is no wheelchair space reserved or available, no space for their companion, no sensory breakout provision, no accessible parking, or their assistance dog has been refused entry.

The first question is who do I complain to: who is the service provider under the Equality Act 2010?

The fan's ticket was sold by their home club. The home club took the money, entered into a transaction with that person, and facilitated their attendance at the event. That is a service relationship. Under the Act, a service provider has a duty to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that disabled people are not placed at a substantial disadvantage compared to non-disabled people. That duty is anticipatory: it exists before anyone asks for anything. The home club cannot wait until a disabled supporter complains to start thinking about what adjustments might be needed at another club's venue.

But the home club does not control the away ground. The away club controls the physical infrastructure, the staffing, the parking, the facilities. They are the ones who decide whether wheelchair spaces are available, what policies they apply to them, whether assistance dogs are admitted, whether sensory spaces are provided. So does the fan's claim lie against the home club, the away club, or both?

The answer, in most cases, is both.

When the home club sells a ticket for an event at another club's ground, it is acting, to some degree, as agent for the away club in that transaction. The law of agency is relevant here: where one organisation acts on behalf of another in facilitating a commercial transaction, questions of liability do not simply stop at the boundary of that transaction. Both parties may owe duties to the customer. The away club, as the party that controls the physical environment, carries clear obligations under section 21 of the Equality Act as the provider of the venue and its facilities. The home club, as the party that sold the ticket and stood behind the commercial offer, cannot disclaim responsibility for the experience that offer promised.

In litigation, a disabled supporter would be entitled to name both clubs as defendants. The ticketing platform may well be added too. The stadium operator, if it is a separate entity from the club, could face scrutiny. All of these parties will then need to argue between themselves about who should bear what portion of any award. That argument is lengthy, expensive, and entirely avoidable.

The practical solution is that the contract between clubs governing ticket distribution for away fixtures should explicitly allocate responsibility for access provision. Which party is responsible for ensuring wheelchair spaces are reserved? Who confirms that assistance dog admission policies comply with the law? Who is accountable if sensory provision is not in place? Who provides accessible communication methods. These questions should be answered before a single ticket is sold, not argued over in a witness statement three years later.

Scenario Two: Deaf Customers at a Gig With No BSL Interpreter

A group of deaf customers holds tickets for a major music concert. They arrive to find there is no British Sign Language interpreter. No one has arranged one. Nobody thought to arrange one.

I acted for three deaf mothers who brought a claim against LHG Live, promoters of a Little Mix concert, for exactly this failure. That case illustrates precisely where liability sits and why the “who is responsible” argument falls apart when it reaches court.

LHG Live, as the promoter, contracted with the venue and with the artist's management to put on the event. They sold tickets to the public. In doing so, they entered into a service relationship with every ticket buyer. The anticipatory duty under section 21 of the Equality Act 2010 requires organisations to consider, in advance, what adjustments would be reasonable for disabled people to access their service. For a large ticketed concert with an audience in the thousands, providing BSL interpretation is not a borderline case. It is a foreseeable requirement for a foreseeable part of the audience. Waiting to be asked is already a breach.

A promoter cannot simply blame the venue for not providing an interpreter: the promoter is the entity that designed and sold the event experience. The venue cannot simply say the promoter did not specify it: the venue operates under its own duties as a public space. The ticketing platform, which collected the transaction and issued the contract with the consumer, may also be drawn in depending on the terms under which tickets were sold.

In the absence of any clear contractual allocation of responsibility, every party in the supply chain becomes a potential defendant.

For the event industry, the practical lesson is direct. Contracts between promoters, venues, and ticketing partners must set out which party is responsible for specific access provisions. BSL interpretation, audio description, accessible seating, companion tickets, sensory spaces, and quiet hours are not afterthoughts to be sorted on the day. They are contractual obligations to be agreed before the event goes on sale. If those provisions are not in the contract, they are likely not in place. And if they are not in place, the Act has already been breached before a single ticket has been scanned.

A Further Layer: Council-Owned Venues and the Public Sector Equality Duty

Many of the venues at the centre of these disputes are not privately owned. Community theatres, sports facilities, and smaller music venues are often council-owned assets licensed out to event promoters and operators.

Where that is the case, the council is not a bystander. Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010, the Public Sector Equality Duty, requires public bodies to have due regard to equality considerations in the exercise of all their functions. Licensing a venue for a large public event is a function of the council. A council that knowingly licenses a venue to an event organiser without taking steps to ensure that the event will be accessible to disabled people arguably fails its own duty under section 149.

This matters in practice because it adds another potential defendant to an already complex picture. It also means that the accessibility obligations do not start with the promoter or the venue operator: they start when the council decides to make the space available. A council that takes a licensing fee without asking any questions about access provision is not insulated from scrutiny simply because someone else ran the event.

For promoters and event organisers working in council-licensed venues, this is worth thinking about. The council's own obligations may work in your favour if you have complied with access requirements, or they may work against you if it becomes apparent that neither party made any inquiry into accessibility before the event went ahead.

A claim involving a public body may also be brought by Judicial Review, which is a much faster process.

How Claimants Find Their Defendants

An experienced claimant lawyer starts with a simple question: who took the money? The presumption is that the consumer's contract is with the organisation they purchased from, and that organisation is the primary defendant. Resellers complicate the picture. Where a ticket has changed hands through a secondary market, the original contractual chain may be broken, and the claimant's position needs to be assessed accordingly. Where the purchase is direct, or through an authorised agent, the analysis is clean. The seller is the starting point.

Before any proceedings are issued, the claimant's lawyer will seek to obtain as much contractual information as possible. Pre-action notification is used specifically to target the contracts between all possible service providers in the chain. If that information is not provided voluntarily, an application for pre-action disclosure to the County Court is available. The purpose is to establish who contracted with whom, what responsibilities were allocated between those parties, and whether any equality obligations were carved out or delegated down the supply chain.

That last point is the one that routinely catches organisations off guard. Unlike some contractual obligations, the statutory duties under the Equality Act 2010 cannot simply be passed down the supply chain by contract. A service provider cannot write its equality obligations out of existence by inserting a clause that makes the venue, the caterer, or the ticketing agent responsible instead. In law, those parties are treated as the agent or servant of the service provider for consumer protection purposes. Their failures are the service provider's failures.

From the claimant's perspective, the claim is straightforward: Buyer against Seller. The claimant is not interested in the internal arrangements between the seller and its sub-contractors. Those arrangements are the seller's problem to resolve. The claimant transacted with the seller. If the experience was inaccessible, the seller is accountable. What the seller chose to do with its venue, its caterer, or its ticketing partner does not give the seller a defence; it gives the seller a potential contribution claim against its own suppliers.

Once the primary claim is issued, the seller has the option to add its own co-defendants. Under the court's rules, the seller can bring in the venue, the ticketing agent, or the promoter within the same proceedings, arguing that if it is liable then others should share the cost. From the court's perspective, resolving all connected issues in a single set of proceedings is preferable to cascading separate actions. However, the party that introduces additional defendants generally takes on responsibility for the costs associated with that introduction, which makes the decision to add co-defendants a commercially significant one.

All of this carries a consequence that organisations rarely anticipate when they think about access failures as a customer service issue rather than a legal one. Once proceedings are issued, the commercial contracts between the parties become a matter of public record. They are disclosed to the court. They may be read out in open proceedings. The terms agreed between the seller and its venue, what was promised, what was carved out, what was left ambiguous, become the subject of judicial scrutiny and, where witnesses are called, cross-examination. For organisations in sport, music, entertainment, and live events, whose commercial arrangements are often sensitive and whose reputations are central to their business model, this is a significant and underappreciated risk.

Some Questions Worth Asking

A large proportion of what organisations do around disabled access is driven by custom and practice: what has always been done, what the venue has always provided, what the last promoter did, what seemed reasonable at the time. Custom and practice is not a legal framework. It does not map onto the anticipatory duty. It does not satisfy the requirement to have considered disabled people's needs in advance. When it is tested in court, it typically reveals that nobody made a conscious decision to comply with the law. They simply carried on doing what they had always done.

Many organisations describe their access provisions as customer service. This framing is more legally significant than they realise. Customer service implies a service relationship with a customer. A service relationship with a customer is exactly what section 29 of the Equality Act 2010 regulates. Calling something customer service does not soften the legal exposure. It confirms it. What was framed as a goodwill gesture, something offered out of generosity rather than obligation, may in fact have constituted a reasonable adjustment that the organisation was legally required to make. Where that adjustment is then withdrawn, reduced, or inconsistently applied, the organisation has not merely disappointed a customer. It has potentially breached a statutory duty.

When organisations operate on custom and practice without auditing their legal position, the result is not a single identifiable failure. It is a pattern of gaps: access provisions that depend on individual goodwill rather than contractual commitment, responsibilities that sit in a grey area between organisations, adjustments that are made reactively when someone complains rather than proactively because the law requires it. Those gaps create complaints. They create uncertainty for disabled customers who cannot rely on a consistent experience. They create safety risks where evacuation plans, accessible exits, or physical infrastructure have never been formally assessed. And they create public exposure, because the people most affected by those gaps are the most motivated to share their experience.

Here are the questions that matter. If you cannot answer them confidently, your organisation has work to do.

The Practical Reality

The Equality Act 2010 applies regardless of how many organisations are in your supply chain. Every organisation providing a service to the public carries its own duties, and those duties arise before anyone asks for adjustments.

Where those questions above cannot be answered, the likelihood of prolonged multi-party litigation rises directly in proportion to the absence of clear contractual language. The conversations that feel uncomfortable to have before an event are far less uncomfortable than the conversations that happen in a Court room.

Strategic Access Advisory works with organisations in sport, music, entertainment, and live events to get these questions answered before they become disputes. That means helping reviews of contracts for access allocation clauses, mapping responsibilities across supply chains, and translating legal obligations into the operational decisions that actually protect your organisation.

Why not get in touch to talk through what that looks like for your organisation?