“One of the things about campaigning is that we always must celebrate what we’re doing and celebrate our achievements. They may not be huge, but they must be embraced as we go along so that we don’t forget what we did.”
Meryl Gaskell
“It’s been about change, it’s been about empowerment, it’s been about enabling and supporting and empowering Disabled people to have an equal say and an equal voice. Do I believe we made a difference? Absolutely, yes. Completely, I do. Did we achieve everything we want? No, of course we didn’t. Was it right, what we did? Yes. Was it right how we did it? No, some of the things I personally did weren’t good. Would I do it all again? Absolutely.”
Alun Davies
Bristol has, from the outset, had a powerful voice in the Disabled People’s Movement. Here are some examples of what was achieved, and how in many cases, their impact was of national significance.
Meryl Gaskell highlights the former Bristol Disabled Living Centre, set up at the Vassall Centre in Fishponds in 1993, which demonstrated equipment and aids including mobility scooters and electric wheelchairs in whole-room settings for people to try out, get help from an occupational therapist, decide for themselves what would be the best thing for them, and then get advice on where to buy it. She says: “This was in the age before this sort of equipment was available in the regular shops, there were no specialist shops, there was no internet shopping and it was very much in its infancy about what was available”. Around 50,000 people were, she says, helped in this way to live independently at home, and to “make life more bearable”. Such centres were set up all over the country, but the Bristol one “was the only one that was set up by Disabled people”. The Centre was also part of an innovative national project which paid Disabled people to get involved in designing future equipment. She says “Everybody was coming up with bright ideas” and adds that until that time, “nobody had thought to ask Disabled people themselves… it was a demonstration of how things could be better”.
Gordon Richardson was one of the founding trustees of the Vassall Centre, which set out to provide office space so Disabled people could run and operate their charities within the building; it received the Queen’s Award for Charities, giving national recognition for its work for Disabled people. He says: “Back in the ’90s when we started the project, there were relatively few buildings that were really accessible” – and without that accessibility, people couldn’t take up positions in office environments. He explains their approach, from his perspective as a wheelchair user: “I needed to be able to get through all the doors. I needed to be able to get to not only my desk, but anybody else’s desk. I needed to get at the filing. I needed to be able to make my own coffee or heat up my lunch, open and close the building at night. Everything I needed to do as an office worker in the building, I should be able to do, and the same for people with low vision”. One of his ideas was to introduce a variable rent rate, “so that those charities that met all of our requests [regarding accessibility] have their rent reduced” – a concept that is now widely used in the wider context of the commercial rental field.
Gordon is also the BDEF representative for the Bristol Walking Alliance, a group of people who are “putting pressure where possible on local and national authorities to make walking, or the pedestrians’ environment, rather better”. He became involved “so that they understand the particular needs of wheelchair users, people with low vision and so on, when designing new road schemes and in particular, the pedestrianised parts of any scheme”.
At what was then the Disabilities Unit at Bristol University, Paul Sullivan worked on a project to encourage the participation of Disabled people – and, for his part, visually impaired people specifically – in “the sorts of extramural courses that universities put on”, giving them both information – including a Braille prospectus – and support, such as Braille and other accessible course materials. He also joined the team at MShed to work on making the museum more inclusive and accessible for visually impaired and all Disabled people, considering everything from content to colour schemes. He says: “they wanted the building to be user-friendly for everybody, but they also wanted to tell ordinary people’s stories and the stories of migrants and the stories of Disabled people, LGBT people, the whole gamut… it was about making a museum that included and worked for Disabled people in total. And we did those things by setting up groups of Disabled people to come in and act as advisors.”
Ruth Pickersgill explains how, in 1995, WECIL (originally the West of England Centre for Integrated Living, and later the West of England Centre for Inclusive Living) was set up in Bristol “to support people to be able to live independently in the community, in their own homes, employ their own PAs, get the advice they needed, the funding they needed, and the support they needed to do that”. She says the enterprise quickly became involved more widely, in things such as “housing issues, benefits issues, a project to support Disabled mothers”. The main aim, she says, “was to support Disabled people to have what we used to say ‘choice and control’: to be able to control their lives and have choice about where they live, who they lived with, and how they lived their lives”.
Ian Popperwell says the Avon Coalition of Disabled People “got involved in local policy developments in terms of educational policy, social care, some health issues, transport accessibility, and [we] started to push our way into those, and made allies of certain staff in the councils. There were generally non-disabled people who were on our side, and saw the point in it. There was a woman who was part of the group who was one of the first leaders in independent living and [who advocated] having really good quality 24/7 [care] package which [is] just normal now, but people would normally have gone into residential care even that short time ago in the late eighties”.
From her perspective as a former development worker and coordinator of what was then the West of England Coalition of Disabled People, Penny Germon says that in addition to the nationally significant things it was involved with – such as, in the early 90s, campaigning for anti-discrimination legislation – there were many Bristol-specific, agenda-changing wins, too. She says: “gradually, some of the day centres had committees of Disabled people. And we set up the Day Centre Users Network right across Avon. That was really exciting – at that time community care was coming in. We also had [an] International Women’s Day, Disabled Women’s Day Celebration. And we did events for young Disabled people. And we did a conference with Black Disabled people. So it was consciousness raising. We developed a course called Disability Who’s Problem – a lot of people came into the Coalition through that route. And it was so exciting being on that journey with people.
“We were making history. We would go to the Bristol Community Groups Network, which was all the community and voluntary groups that met at that time, and we had to campaign for them to hold those meetings in accessible buildings. And also we had young Disabled people’s mentoring. We built relationships in social services with people who would come to us. And then we would get to a point where we could build things together, what today would be called co-design. I think we invented co-design.
“I think we made a really big difference. And we were united and… we made our presence felt. And that’s because there were people who had some real insight, investing in community development, and that growing the Movement. As well as the kind of policy side of things, the connections with the local authorities and others were so important to bring about change. So many newsletters, so many debates. I’d like to think that we have made it a better place for Disabled people, younger Disabled people.”
Alun Davies says: “I remember being down in Broadmead collecting petitions for signature. We did all the campaigning things. We were helped very much by the fact that Roger Berry, who was then the Kingswood MP, took a private members’ bill on anti-discrimination legislation, on the civil rights bill, and obviously we worked very closely with [him]. And we very much coalesced around that campaign”.
“And I was Centre of Living Integrated Living project worker with the Coalition and was responsible for putting together the feasibility study, which led to the funding application for what became WECIL, West of England Centre for Integrated Living, which opened in 1995. Up until then, we got funding for various projects – we were one of the first authorities in the country to get a direct payments project.
Alun’s involvement also had direct impact on disability rights issues at a national level. He says: “One of the other things I’m proud of, I was key, together with two other really, really dear comrades, [we] got what was then the union NALGO and then UNISON to adopt the Social Model of Disability as its position on disability in 1993. And UNISON’s kept that to today, and is now the biggest trade union in the country. Many of us had a trade union and party political background or an activist background. Many of us didn’t. There was a huge mix. Many people were from the women’s movement, the LGBT movement. There weren’t many active Black Disabled people at that time. But there was a wide range of experiences brought into the movement, and we were good at what we did. We knew how to organise campaigns, we knew how to bring groups together.
“In the early ’90s the move for anti-discrimination legislation got traction. The big disability charities to this day will claim it was down to them, but actually, the drive for it came very much from the Disabled People’s Movement. If it hadn’t been for BCODP and the individual Coalitions, and the work of individuals, we would not have had anti-discrimination legislation then. I believe to this day that the big charities were forced to adopt the campaign rather than lead it. We very much led it from a Disabled people’s perspective, because we were very effective operators. The national leadership of the Disabled people’s movement in the early ’90s, which amounted to about 40, 50 people, were very effective, skilled, political operators and organisers.
“We really were at the front-end of taking on a very oppressive model and taking it on in a very direct way.”