UK: The House of Commons Transport Select Committee has published the Access Denied: Rights Versus Reality in Disabled People’s Access to Transport report calling an overhaul of laws, strategy and attitudes to make it easier for disabled people to use public transport.
The report calls on the government to set out concrete timescales for achieving independent accessibility across the rail network, and commit to setting out within 12 months a road map to inform the rolling stock, station and network enhancement strategies of the Department for Transport and future Great British Railways.
The committee says progress in implementing station accessibility upgrades has been halting, slow and costly. It suggests a different commissioning approach based on a rolling programme of rapid interventions, as opposed to individual station projects commissioned separately. By creating certainty and consistency for contractors, this could speed up delivery and lower costs.
The committee says DfT should commit to publishing an open register of key accessibility assets on the rail and bus network which can be drawn upon by journey planning tools.
A ‘seemingly routine, everyday nature of assistance failures’ is unacceptable, and accessibility must not be viewed through the same lens as customer service where less than 100% performance is considered normal. The report says accessibility failures should be vanishingly rare, and a change of mindset is urgently needed ’recognising that accessibility is both a non-negotiable matter of human rights and discrimination, and a health and safety issue’.
‘This inquiry worked on the premise that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their condition or difference, and that services should be designed to enable disabled people to travel independently, not reliant on others’, said Chair Ruth Cadbury when the report was published on March 20. ‘After all, services that work for disabled people also work better for everyone.’
