Accessibility and the Limits of UK Equality Law: Time for a UK Accessibility Act?

06 February 2025, 6:00 pm–7:00 pm

This lecture was delivered by Professor Anna Lawson, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2024-25.

Speaker: Prof Anna Lawson (University of Leeds)

Chair: The Baroness Grey-Thompson DBE (House of Lords)
About the lecture

The importance of accessibility, particularly to disabled and older people, has long been acknowledged. It is given international prominence by Article 9 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2006, the opening words of which affirm that it is a precondition “to enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life”. At the national level, accessibility barriers provided a key focus of and driver for campaigns for legal protection from disability discrimination. Disability rights advocates were quick to identify the potential for systemic change, including on accessibility, of equality law obligations such as the anticipatory reasonable adjustment duty and the Public Sector Equality Duty.

In this paper I critically reflect on the extent to which equality law in Britain is now, thirty years after the Disability Discrimination Act, in fact working to embed and enhance accessibility. Alongside a number of successes, concerns about the adequacy of the Equality Act as the guardian of accessibility will be explored. This reflection provides the backdrop for the question at the heart of this paper – whether the solution is simply to make the Equality Act work harder to protect accessibility, or whether it is now time for the UK to follow jurisdictions such as the EU and Canada and introduce specific accessibility legislation? I will argue that it is indeed time for a new approach.