Hybrid | Accessibility and the Limits of UK Equality Law: Time for a UK Accessibility Act?
This lecture will be delivered by Professor Anna Lawson, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2024-25
Hybrid | Accessibility and the Limits of UK Equality Law: Time for a UK Accessibility Act?
06 Feb 2025, 18:00 – 19:00
Accessibility and the Limits of UK Equality Law: Time for a UK Accessibility Act?
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.
Watch the video directly on our YouTube channel or view it below:
Anna Lawson is a Professor of Law at the University of Leeds, where she is also (from January 2025) co-director of the Centre for Law and Social Justice and formerly a director of the multidisciplinary Centre for Disability Studies. Anna has led a range of multinational research projects, including most recently a European Research Council Advanced Grant project called ‘Inclusive Public Space: Law, Universality and Difference in the Accessibility of Streets’. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences; patron of the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks; honorary Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple; and winner of the 2016 Bob Hepple Award (from the Equal Rights Trust and Industrial Law Society) for her work on disability equality.
The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.
You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.
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Image by Marcus Aurelius from Pexels
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