Chapter 8 - Empowering services

If its ability to adapt to a more competitive and demanding funding culture has arguably led to BDRC’s survival, underlying this has been the unwavering long term commitment of a small core group of generally uncelebrated board members, such as Tim and Andy.

The longest consistently serving member of the BDRC board is Irene Wright. Inspired by hearing Bob Findlay talk at a meeting of the Disability Advisory Board of her Trade Union in the early 1990s, Irene immediately became involved with BDRC and has remained passionately committed to the promotion of the social model of disability across her beloved Birmingham ever since.

From joining the board of BDRC, Irene became involved in wider access work across Birmingham and went on to play a leading role in both the Birmingham Access Committee and in establishing the city centre based Shopmobility schemes.

“I actually went on to the Access Committee many, many, years ago as the BDRC representative. I took over as Chair temporarily for three months and, 12 years down the line, I’m still Chair.

“I’ve become very much involved with access and the city council actually includes me on some street works contracts. If there are big jobs, then I have to be consulted. I go out and have a look to make sure that things are laid out right. I feel that it’s very important to say to them that if you’ve got it right for disabled people, you’ve got it right for everybody.

“We are another organisation of disabled people, our make-up is probably 80% disabled people which is much higher than even BCODP ask for – it only asks for 51% so we are very good.

“It means that people who are giving the information and those who are trying to assist with advice are the people who have actually got different disabilities. We are giving, hopefully, the right advice and I think that’s important because once we can get the council to take notice of what we are saying then we are more likely to get a city that’s more accessible.

“One of the things we must remember is Birmingham is built on a hill – we’d love it flattened, but, unfortunately because of the billions of pounds it would cost us, it will never happen – so it’s just trying to make the best of what you’ve got and that’s what we try to do.”

Such is Irene’s national reputation that in August 2004, she was visited by Bert Massie in his role as Chair of the Disability Rights Commission who had come to Birmingham to gain a perspective on the progress of the DDA in the Second City. During his visit, Irene gave Bert a tour of Birmingham city centre, showing him both good and bad examples of accessible buildings.

Aside from Irene, consistently chipping away at the rock face of local authority planning processes over the past two decades, another constant throughout BDRC’s history has been its information service. The roll call of officers including Trevor Bailey, David Heap, Brian Cleaver, Denise Swithenby, Vicky Wooldridge and Janet Higgins, John Boular and Toni Cuddihy.

From the very outset of the modern disabled people’s movement, information was seen as a vital and fundamental requirement for the empowerment and independence of disabled people. When the Derbyshire Centre for Integrated Living was discussing the ‘Seven Needs of Independent Living’ in the early 1980s, information was, by design or otherwise, at the top of the list:

Information

Counselling

Housing

Technical aids

Personal assistance

Transport

Access

The emergence of the phrase ‘the Seven Needs of Independent Living’ built on the ideas of academics such as Vic Finkelstein, provided a framework for practical action out of the social definition of disability.

Most of the new national organisations and agencies around disability from the 1960s and ‘70s onwards, user-led or otherwise, including Disablement Income Group, Spinal Injuries Association, Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation, Disability Alliance, British Council of Disabled People, Disability Law Service, Holiday Care Service, Disabled Living Foundation, Centre For Accessible Environments and National Bureau for Students with Disabilities (Skill) put information provision at the heart of their services.

Whether their primary focus was campaigning, personal finance, education, housing, leisure, mobility, employment, rights or independent living, an information service was seen as the vital tool which empowered people through knowledge.

No longer was the primary purpose of a disability group or charity to do things for and to disabled people, in effect controlling disabled people’s lives for them. The theory now being that if people were given information about benefits and services they could make their own choices and take control of their own lives.

A more organic development took place from 1973 through an evolving national network of small, independent and local organisations, generally run by disabled people, whose sole purpose was, quite simply, providing all types of disability information to all disabled people.

From the first one pioneered by Ken Davis and colleagues in Derbyshire in 1973, these groups popularly became known as DIALs (Disability Information and Advice Line) and in 1986 a national co-ordinating body was set up called DIAL UK which supported the network of associations whilst each maintained its own independence.

Whilst local DIAL organisations were springing up across the West Midlands generally, Birmingham never actually had a dedicated Birmingham DIAL. Perhaps the more complex provision of advice and information services in a large city did not lend itself to the development of a dedicated service, for instance, neither London, Manchester, Newcastle or Liverpool developed city-wide DIALs.

When the BDRC was launched in 1992 it had to contend for punters, funding and its reputation with at least two other providers of disability information locally, including Disability West Midlands, based at Moseley Hall Hospital, which launched a mobile information vehicle funded by the Birmingham Inner City Partnership in 1992 and with the Information Service on Disability (ISD) based at Oak Tree Lane Regional Rehabilitation Centre.

In addition to these groups, people living on the borders of the city could also seek their information from groups like Solihull DIAL, Coventry Council of Disabled People, Dudley Benefits Shop, One Voice Wolverhampton, North Worcestershire DIAL and Sandwell CARES. These were later joined by Walsall DIAL and Ideal For All Sandwell as well as additional groups in Birmingham such as the Coalition of Disabled People, Freshwinds in Selly Oak and the Lisieux Trust in Erdington to name but a few.

There were also the specialist information services, often set up by people with great personal experience and knowledge in a particular area. A well-known face at all three of the original Birmingham services during the early to mid 1990s was Andy Whyment, a retired police officer from Kings Norton who set up the Mobility Advice Line in 1993.

Having done voluntary advice work around mobility issues, primarily with Disability West Midlands as its motoring correspondent, Andy set up a dedicated line in his own home which, on his death, transferred to ISD at Oak Tree Lane in Selly Oak.

Another disabled person with strong connections to both Birmingham Disability Rights Group and Birmingham Disability Resource Centre was Jenny Poyner whose expertise, like Irene’s was around access. Jenny became the first person in Birmingham to become an auditor member of the National Register of Access Consultants.

She set up her own organisation, Birmingham Access Ch4

information around access as well as producing a directory of accessible venues in the city. In common with Irene Wright, Jenny was awarded an MBE for her commitment to access issues in Birmingham.

Disability arts were also represented as a field of expertise in the city by West Midlands Disability Arts Forum, an organisation which had two incarnations, one in the early 1990s led by Katherine Walsh and the other in the early 2000s which was based at the Custard Factory in Digbeth and was managed by Alan McClean who currently works at Black Country Touring.

For the most part though, as vital as information has become to the lives of disabled people, it is often a service taken for granted or ignored by most of us until we actually need it ourselves, usually in a crisis. In 2006, RADAR published a guide for newly disabled people and their families called If Only I Had Known That A Year Ago…

Its title perfectly expresses the high value of good information provision to the people who need it and at the time they need it.

It is an unfortunate reality that organisations like BDRC are generally only missed when they are no longer around; supporting people to claim benefits and advising them how to make complaints or invoke legal processes are not commonly celebrated activities and, on the contrary, can be contentious as they seek to open gates which the nation’s ranks of civil servants, politicians and assorted ‘professionals’ strive to keep, if not locked, then certainly only one-third ajar.