Chapter 5 - Rights Now!

When the Disability Resource Centre opened in Birmingham in 1992, the national campaign for disability discrimination legislation in the United Kingdom was well underway and within the next three years it would culminate in the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

Since the early 1980s there had been several attempts to pass anti-discrimination legislation through parliament but, whilst generally receiving cross-party support, all of these attempts had failed.

Discrimination and Disabled People in Britain, a book by Colin Barnes and published by the British Council of Disabled People (BCODP) in 1991 laid out the case for fully comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Legislation and gave fresh impetus to a mounting national campaign.

The call to enshrine the proposals arising from Barnes’s book into UK legislation was answered by MP for Manchester Wythenshawe, Alf Morris. His motivation was led by his childhood experience of watching his own father’s slow deterioration in health and eventual death and the subsequent struggles of his widowed mother in the 1930s and 1940s.

As an MP Morris had led the movement that brought in the Chronically Sick & Disabled Person’s Act in 1970, becoming the world’s first Minister for the Disabled in 1974. In 1991 he introduced a Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill which was very much in line with the new BCODP campaign.

The opening of the Disability Resource Centre (BDRC) therefore coincided not just with a ground swell of public opinion and a wave of new activism, but the formation of a national alliance of disability organisations called Rights Now! The unique thing about the Rights Now! Group was that it was a partnership of both user led organisations, such as BCODP, and many of the big national charities, such as Scope, RNIB and RNID.

In spite of the inherent antagonisms which existed within what was at the time a very unlikely alliance of the organisations ‘of’ and ‘for’ disabled people, by pooling both commitment and resources Rights Now! was very successful in countering government arguments that sought to dismiss or minimise the case for anti discrimination legislation.

Irene Wright, a committee member of the newly created BDRC, conveys the sense of pride that local people felt when they participated in campaigning activity on a national level:

“Yes, I think when I first came here it made me realise how important the anti-discrimination law that we needed should be. Before getting involved with the Resource Centre itself, I became involved as a volunteer with Birmingham Disability Rights Group, so it all marries into one another in the end.

“I can remember that from here we as a committee of the Disability Resource Centre actually sponsored one of the banners that went down to London on July 9, on that famous day when there were so many disabled people in Trafalgar Square, that was when the first part of the DDA actually got started.

“That’s something to do, I think, very much with the history of the DRC and Birmingham Disability Rights Group, that they were actually part of something positive that came out of the government for disabled people.”

An interesting connection between the new Disability Resource Centre and the aforementioned MP for Manchester Wythenshawe, Alf Morris, was that his niece Estelle Morris had been elected as Labour MP for the Yardley constituency in 1992.

Looking around for somewhere to base her constituency office, Estelle Morris’s team had made an approach to the new Yardley based Disability Resource Centre, asking if she could rent office space from them. After consultation, the request was turned down as the centre did not want to be seen as being partisan and the Member for Yardley moved into alternative accommodation on the Bierton Road site.

Many of the people who were involved in the early days of the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre recall a period of forming, storming and norming on many different levels.

Some of these challenges were around practical access issues such as the locking systems on windows, the layout of toilets and the height of light switches. Some things involved general tenancy and building issues which had to be resolved through long-running negotiations with the city council as the landlord.

For instance, the building was a constant target for burglars and vandals for months on end until security measures were put in place which resulted in the feeling that the centre looked and felt like Fort Knox with heavy duty anti-burglar features around what was intended to be a user-friendly, inclusive and inviting environment.

The launch of the new user-led centre may have represented a successful end to BDRG’s seven year campaign, but new questions were now arising on a daily basis around operational, funding and management issues. Terry Vincent recalls the realisation felt by the employees that operating the BDRC was going to be a very different proposition from working for the Rights Group:

“We had a collective lack of experience as entrepreneurs running anything the size of the DRC. Mostly all we had done up to then was hold discussion meetings and plan campaigns. Now we had gone to managing a huge budget and managing a building that was vandalised from day one.

“You had the funders wanting you to do it their way and the BDRG wanting you to do it its way and whichever way you turned there was a problem. In the end it was the “service users” who were failing to get a service because there were obstacles to getting in the building, there were un-set up projects.

“For quite a while when people came in the only thing that they could do was go to the library – that was really it.

“We were constantly being given deadlines to meet and if they weren’t met then the funding didn’t come and if the funding didn’t come… Also each quarter the payments would come late so we struggled from the beginning.”

Robin Surgeoner recalls a very definite split around this time between the Rights Group and the Resource Centre. Things came to a head when people met to appoint the new management board for the centre:

“Rather than BDRG becoming the managing body it kind of got sidelined and all of a sudden there was a new management committee on the board of directors of the DRC. It wasn’t BDRG and it sort of changed its essence really. Perhaps the real sticking point was the funding and the fact that the council gave so much money and wanted to have a huge influence on the board.

“I remember coming to one particular meeting, in what’s now the Len Sutton Room when the building was still a shell, and there was a big discussion of who could be a board member. It was as if you’re BDRG you’re not a board member. BDRG isn’t part of this anymore. That was when there was a big kind of parting of the ways.

“It ended up with a board and a new set of employees. Even though the inception of the Resource Centre was BDRG’s, the lead started to be dictated rather than being organic. If BDRG had been given the money, the management and had become the employer, that would have been a different story.

“I don’t mean that in a sour grapes way, I just think that wasn’t allowed to happen. It became the council’s baby, it became the council’s Disability Resource Centre. It lost that organic, that dynamism that came from BDRG.”