I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for me to make a statement to the House to mark the publication of the Transport Committee’s first report of this Parliament. Our report is called “Access denied: rights versus reality in disabled people’s access to transport”. It brings to a conclusion work done by our predecessor Committee, on which I sat for a while in the previous Parliament, and for which we thank it.
The report first sets out the evidence we receive from disabled people about their experiences of using transport networks in this country. Their experiences will come as no surprise to most hon. Members, whose constituents tell us about rail stations that remain stubbornly inaccessible, taxi services that have refused carriage because of assistance dogs, and being left high and dry at airports or on trains when they have booked passenger assistance that just does not arrive on time. No mode of transport is free from problems, despite most notionally having accessible facilities and policies.
Those failures affect people with all kinds of disabilities and access needs. The needs of wheelchair users and people with sight loss might seem obvious, but the Committee also heard from people with health conditions who need easy access to toilets and from those with autism, who describe how overcrowded or unpredictable transport affects them. Perhaps most shocking of all, 60% of disabled people who responded to our survey said that almost every journey was beset with problems. More than a third said that more than once a week they decided not to make a journey because they knew it would be too complicated, too unsafe or that things were likely to go wrong. That is simply an unacceptable infringement of people’s human rights to go to work, to access education, health care and family, to participate in society and just to have fun. Transport is not an end in itself. It is supposed to be an enabler. But far too often it is disabling people. Around one in seven in the UK population have a disability. One respondent to our survey told us:
“There’s an assumption that disabled people’s time is less valuable—that it’s okay to make us wait for a rail worker to turn up with a ramp. I’ve been late to important meetings because of this, and it makes me feel like a second class citizen…I barely go to see my mum or friends at home because the transport is so bad for wheelchair users I don’t know how I’d do it. It’s affected my friendships, relationships and working life, and it's embarrassing. I just want to be able to use public transport like everyone else.”
In theory, we have laws to promote accessibility and equality, but they are clearly not working. There is a raft of equality legislation and specific regulations about transport that, if implemented consistently, ought to guarantee access and freedom from discrimination. From the Equality Act 2010 and the public sector equality duty to the minutiae of vehicle regulations, we have the framework. On policy, in 2018 the Government adopted an inclusive transport strategy that aimed to achieve:
“equal access for disabled people using the transport system, with assistance if physical infrastructure remains a barrier, by 2030”.
Ministers in the previous Government told the Committee they thought progress towards that goal was on track. The reality seems to be completely at odds with the rights and with policy aspirations.
Our report aims to set out why that is and what should be done about it. We set out examples of accessibility being deprioritised, often because it is seen as too impractical or costly to achieve it. Plans for implementing step-free access on the rail network, for example, have been beset by halting progress, and many of us are still awaiting an update on the Access for All step-free projects at our local stations. We argue that a certain level of failure seems to be deemed acceptable by transport providers, such as when providing Passenger Assist services. We describe how accessibility is not taken into account early enough in the process of policy development, such as when proposals to close railway ticket offices wholesale made it to consultation. The public said no, but they should not have had to. We discuss the vital role of sufficient staff who are well trained in how to support travel needs of people with different needs.
A change of mindset throughout the system, from the top down, is needed urgently. Failures should be vanishingly rare, not commonplace. Access to transport must be recognised as a human right, not as a matter of customer service. Concrete plans and real resources need to be put behind a new inclusive transport strategy, one that sets out a realistic pathway to achieving that goal of equal access.
The routine, everyday nature of access failures stood out in our inquiry, but it is punishingly hard to hold anyone to account for failures. Seeking redress, or even just reporting them to the responsible body, is a huge, exhausting and often thankless burden. In theory, individuals can take legal action under the Equality Act, but it is costly, risky and time-consuming, so few cases are brought. Even when cases are successful, lasting systemic change does not happen. More of the heavy lifting needs to be done by regulators and enforcement bodies. They currently often have neither the mandate nor the resources to involve themselves at a low enough threshold. Only long-standing, organisation-wide failures tend to be pursued, and only then when informal measures have been exhausted.
As a result, while individual disabled people often lose count of the number of occasions on which they have been failed, regulators can generally count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of formal enforcement actions that have been taken. We must bring that into balance. There have to be consequences for failure. That is why our report asks Ministers to move towards a more robust active enforcement regime. We invite Government to consider whether a single body, with expertise in and responsibility for accessibility across transport modes, would be a more effective model. We recommend a unified service to receive and triage accessibility complaints, to ensure they reach the relevant operator or authority, to follow them up if not resolved and ensure that systemic issues are identified.
We also ask for a review of the legal framework to replace the patchwork that has grown up ad hoc over time. Users find it difficult to know what they are entitled to, operators find it difficult to know what they have to provide, and changes in technology and travel trends leave gaps in the law. In our report we invite the Government to consider whether a framework based on more explicit standards would be more effective, and that the framework’s design and outcome must include disabled people at every stage.
To conclude, I thank not only our predecessor Committee for taking the evidence on which this report is based, and the Committee staff who worked so hard on the inquiry and the report, but, more important, those who gave evidence, especially about their own experiences of travelling as a disabled person and their expert analysis of what is going wrong. I particularly thank Claire Lindsey, and Alan Benson, a champion for disabled people’s rights on transport who sadly passed away last year. Alan and Claire took me through London at the start of the inquiry and opened my eyes to the issues that affect people with autism, and those with restricted mobility, when travelling.
The words of disabled people, quoted throughout our report, are a call to action that we expect the Government to heed. Our Committee will hold the Government to account for doing so, and for bringing reality in line with rights. I commend our report to the House, and we look forward to receiving a considered response from the Government in due course.