Chapter 4 - continued

In the late 1980s, current leader of Birmingham City Council’s Labour Group and former leader of the council, Sir Albert Bore, was chair of the city’s Economic Development Committee. Sir Albert explains why the council supported the calls for a disability resource centre and also why funding was identified by this committee, as opposed to the traditional source of local authority funding for disability projects from social services:

"You might find it surprising that in many respects this came out of an Economic Development Unit and not out of a Social Services Department and I think that that is the context that you should explore to begin with.

“What’s that about is, that for a period in the mid to late 1980’s, the Economic Development Unit as it first was (it later became the Economic Development Department) was setting up a number of centres to help to push enterprise type activity and to assist with different groupings.

“Some of it, such as the Disability Resource Centre is still around and also the Credit Union Development Agency which was an initiative developed roughly in the same period. There were a number of Enterprise Centres assisting, for example, those in the black community.

“So there was some more specialised or focussed activity. You have to put that long gestation period up to the beginning of the 1990s into that context where there were a lot of resources going in to setting up centres serving different functions within the community.

“It was the lack of Government encouragement in the previous decade – this was the 1980s and it was a period of Thatcher government and unemployment. In Birmingham in 1984/85 there was an unemployment average rate of 25% and in some of the inner city wards it was more than 50%. So there were a number of council initiatives to try to put resource into communities, driven from the community base in that environment of a citywide economic crisis, if you like.”

As chair of the Economic Development Committee from 1984 to 1993, the negotiations, funding and planning of the proposed centre fell under the stewardship of Sir Albert’s committee with Susan O’Shea being one of the principle EDU officers liaising with Terry, Bob and the members of BDRG.

Sir Albert is asked whether he thinks the development of a user-led centre back in the early ‘90s was more successful because it was viewed as an entrepreneurial enterprise as opposed to a social care service. Was the development less bureaucratic than it might have otherwise been?

“It is hard to say really. What my memory tells me is that you had a number of champions around who wanted to see this as a resource led by the community and the community of people with disabilities.

“It was possibly also because it was Economic Development Unit driven that it had a less bureaucratic (your choice of words) form. Perhaps if it had come through a Social Services lead it might have taken a different form – we will never know will we?”

Susan O’Shea worked closely with Terry and the BDRG board on the development, not just of the proposed Centre, but in terms of the Rights Group itself. Susan explained:

“Well there was a dual approach really. There was work to support the core group (which was the Birmingham Disability Rights Group) to develop its own organisation to put in place things like constitution; to run its own affairs; to develop itself as an organisation in its own right and to develop a membership base.

“Flowing from that there was a wider plan (being the enterprise side) which was to develop activities and projects that were services and activities that members wanted to utilise.

“Things like, for example, the Information and Resource Centre and Employment were key things always mentioned in consultations.

“But there was a lot of planning to do, a lot of work to actually move from a Group which was running an organisation to the point where you would run a full-scale project and building as well as manage staff and budgets.

“So a process needed to happen and that was a lot of capacity building and developmental work alongside the research itself to see if a centre was feasible, how it could be funded and how it could be managed and organised. It took time to do that.”

Robin Surgeoner was working for Birmingham City Council as a Sports Development Officer when he first encountered BDRG. As a paralympic athlete he had been appointed to work in the city and was visited by Maria Mleczko on behalf of BDRG.

He recalls that Maria was on a fairly resolute fact finding mission and needed reassurance that he was ‘on the good side’ in spite of working for the city council.

A few months after the meeting, in 1990, Robin’s wife Tracy became involved in the group and, before long, they were both full blown members.

In common with many disabled people, Robin recalls arguing for change from a social model before he had actually heard the term being used to describe this perspective:

“As early as 1985 I was arguing about access to sport and recognition of athletes, access to participation and all sorts of things, as a political issue, not just as a sports sort of nice thing, that was the whole point.

“I received my MBE in 1988 which was for services to disability sport, but was primarily about the fact I had been arguing and fighting for equality of recognition.

“Recognition that performance of excellence is personal and individual, it can’t necessarily be measured against able-bodied or non-disabled world records and things like that. So I’ve always come from that angle.

“I worked with what was then the London Disability Resource Team in piloting the very first National Disability Equality Training Package through the then British Sports Association for Disabled People, which was as it sounds, a sports organisation, but part of their vision was about access to participation as well.

“At a political level they had contacts which reached up to a ministerial level. I guess becoming known as the social model gave it a much more easily deliverable definition if you like. Although it’s astonishing how few people still really understand, or want to understand the issues.

“I came to the BDRG already pretty angry, for want of a better word and I’m now known by many people, as an artist known as Angry Fish. I wrote lots of prose, poetry, stories and articles that used to go into the BDRG newsletters. Then I met Bob.

“I have always had a good relationship with Bob as, for the majority of the time, we sing from the same hymn sheet. When we had the first International Day of Disabled People in ‘93, we were well established and BDRG effectively ran the majority of that day’s events in terms of disability arts and stuff like that, we were going to British Council of Disabled People (BCODP) conferences all over the place in the early ‘90s as well.

“I think that BDRG was probably one of the most powerful disability organisations Birmingham ever had. It was a thorn in the side of the council, it was a thorn in the side of the Evening Mail but, if there was ever something going on that was remotely about disabled people and wasn’t human interest stories, but actually took it to the next level, it was BDRG who the papers, who the BBC, who ITV Central... they came to us.”

Given the average age and the left of centre political convictions of the majority of BDRG members during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, perhaps an unlikely contributor to the long development phase of the Disability Resource Centre was a former George Dixon Grammar School pupil and RAF intelligence officer, Len Sutton.

After completion of his service with the RAF in the early 1950s, Len had embarked on a university degree course in engineering, followed by a long career in technical drawing and training management. In 1980 he was made redundant after nearly 30 years, but he soon landed a new post as supervisor of a Manpower Service Commission City Centre Access programme through Birmingham Voluntary Service Council.

His subsequent work, overseeing access surveys in the city, led to his appointment as Access Officer for a new group called Access For All in 1983. In 1987 he became the Director of the Access Committee for Birmingham, overseeing a substantial project to conduct access surveys across the city, with particular attention to the inner city wards of Birmingham.

Len’s technical expertise, along with his commitment to making the built-environment fully accessible, would be of great value to the BDRG. During the planning process for the Disability Resource Centre, Len worked closely alongside Bob Findlay, Katherine Walsh, Maria Mleczko, Robin and Tracy Sugeoner, Terry Vincent and other BDRG members to prepare documents such as reports and plans.

His expertise gave the Group an edge in its negotiations with the city council and his contribution was such that following his death, a room at the Disability Resource Centre was named in his memory in 1996.