The United Kingdom has a complex recent history regarding anti-discrimination legislation that stretches back nearly 50 years, including more recent disability discrimination legislation commencing with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 through to incorporation within the Equality Act 2010. The history and particularities of the UK disability movement, whose campaigning resulted in anti-discrimination legislation, is well documented, as are critiques of the law.
Understanding Disability Discrimination Law through Geography by Fayyaz Vellani further explores the scope of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 in ‘redressing the marginal status of disabled people in England and Wales’ (7). The book explores disability discrimination legislation in the United Kingdom, the USA and Australia through empirical study, including interviews, surveys and document analysis. It focuses on two higher education institutions, with interviews with staff predominantly from disability services and a ‘storytelling’ section on the lived experiences of students in relation to labelling and categorisation and the navigation and negotiation of their institutions.
The book opens with an important discussion of the role of law and a legal framework in ‘seeking to ensure an accessible environment for disabled people’ (7). This chapter provides a critique of legislation that claims neutrality but in fact is written and enacted for the ‘dominant’ group’s perspectives. Vellani prefers a critical legal understanding of the law, which looks on the law as relational and acquires its meaning through social action. The limitations of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (much of the book focuses on law that has now been superseded), Vellani discusses, are that it is assumes disabled people will take up cases, that enforcement and resources are adequate, that rights can be guaranteed regardless of political climate and that it can be applied uniformly across the UK without recognising geographical context. However, such criticism can be made of much, if not most, civil law and, in any event, disability discrimination law in the United Kingdom (as elsewhere) adopts a contextualised approach to establishing rights through the notion of ‘reasonable adjustments’. For example, universities may legitimately interpret ‘reasonableness’ differently, depending on their organisational and physical size and structure, location and resulting transport links, the services they provide to students and their core business. Statutory guidance and case law develops the intricacies of ‘reasonableness’. This may of course bring its own problems, and one may argue that the notion of reasonable does not work. However, despite an epilogue that purports to bring legislation up to date with the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, Vellani’s analysis remains considerably out of date; for example, regarding the burden of proof in litigation and in his assertion that there is no positive public-sector equality duty for the characteristic of disability.
There is an interesting discussion of the hurdles and psychological demands for individuals in proving that they are disabled within the meaning of legislation, with individuals having to list limitations and shortfalls in order to access their rights. This is a theme throughout the book, and also an issue raised by disability activists and disabled staff and students we have engaged with in our work. It is unclear whether Vellani would argue for a completely different system without the need for individual, targeted support, or a system where the requirement for individual support is mitigated but still required, and where this support is accessed in a way that does not require labelling and categorisation. How the law would function in either of these scenarios is not explored in any depth.
Part 2 of the book, ‘Implementation’, is the section of primary interest to us, with an interest in the experiences of disabled people within higher education and the role that law can play in improving disabled people’s lives. The section opens with a discussion of the ‘new managerialism’ in higher education and the importance of looking at the subtle forms of power, as well as the difference between the language of inclusion and anti-discrimination and what happens on the ground. Vellani has conducted extensive fieldwork within two anonymised institutions: Cromwell University, an international, highly competitive, hierarchical university with a conservative interpretation of liberal education; and City of Bexley College, a regionally known FE and HE college with a radical interpretation of liberal education (120–121). The two institutions highlight different power structures, level of resources and location and are therefore able to provide different contexts in which legislation is implemented.
Of particular interest are those themes relating to physical access (including examples of cost considerations and the ensuing rationalisation of decision-making based on budgets); the use of language (including aligning language to the values of the institution and the importance of the unspoken); and how the varying structures of decision-making has an effect on the implementation of practice. However, the higher education institution sector is highly diverse and autonomous; and in only considering two institutions, the variety of institutional drivers and novelties are inevitably constrained, such as those in smaller specialist higher education institutions.
The following storytelling section, of importance in highlighting the nuances of the lived experience of disabled people, provides further contextual data around the themes of labelling and categorisation and navigation and negotiation of the case-study institutions. It is here that the major positive of the law is mentioned in an otherwise grim assessment – the law can be used to implement change as staff with senior responsibility fear damage to institutional reputation.
Vellani concludes that considerations of context are required for the law; it is too abstract, is based on medicalised assumptions and is adversarial. Although we would not necessarily disagree with these statements, we would also stress the positive elements within legislation, such as the positive public-sector equality duty (which may give impetus to disability awareness training, for example). In essence, the law can be considered as a ‘floor’ of rights, rather than a ‘ceiling’.
Understanding Disability Discrimination Law through Geography will be of interest to those who wish to get a flavour of the potential micro-power relations within universities and the everyday experiences of disabled students navigating these systems, and it is these views which we believe give the most novelty to the work.
Equality Challenge Unit, UK
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© 2014, David Ruebain and Chris Brill
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.919176