Doug Paulley's blog

disability, data protection, activism and other such

No, Bns Williams, the Equality Act doesn’t work for me.

Posted on by Doug Paulley

I have been made aware of Bns Williams’ positive mention in the Lords, of my enforcement of the Equality Act.

There are good examples of disabled people enforcing the duty to make reasonable adjustments. Noble Lords will no doubt have heard of the case of Mr Paulley, who has successfully enforced the Act on many occasions.

I wish to specifically refute that the Equality Act works for disabled people or that it is enforceable in any realistic manner by anybody.

As I said in my evidence to the Equality Act 2010 and Disability Select Committee,

Nearly all disabled people have little to no prospect of enforcing their rights under the Equality Act.

I go on to talk about some of the barriers disabled people experience that scupper any chance of enforcing their rights, including internalised oppression, no serious attempt at providing education, lack of personal assistance, the lack of legal representation, the impenetrable nature of the court system, lack of legal funding, the financial and other risks, the energy and other costs – to name but a few. I quoted Cloisters Chambers’ input into the Equality Bill,

Cloisters [Chambers] point out that in any event, relying upon individuals to bring about systemic change through individual litigation places a heavy burden upon disabled people who, in many instances, experience discrimination on a daily basis which it would be time consuming and exhausting to challenge on each and every occasion.

That is every bit as much the case now as it was when Cloisters said it in 2009.

Not only does the Equality Act not work for disabled people in general, it doesn’t work for me. It takes an inordinate amount of time and energy for me to take cases. It affects me profoundly. I risk financial ruination every time I take a case. I don’t always win, and even when I do, it doesn’t achieve anything like systematic change in service provision to disabled people.


I object to my experience being used as any form of evidence that the Equality Act is enforceable by any disabled person. It isn’t.

100% of Scotrail’s stations are accessible – official

Posted on by Doug Paulley

Great news! It’s official! Scotrail’s assisted travel helpline told me so it must be true – All Scotrail’s stations are 100% accessible to all passengers, including wheelchair users!

Here’s the transcript – Scotrail’s in bold, I’m not:

  • All stations we deal with are all accessible for wheelchair users.
  • All Scotrail stations? That’s impressive.
  • Yes that is correct, all Scotrail stations are accessible for all our customers.

So there you go, Scotrail have evidently become the first operator (with more than 20 stations) to achieve 100% step free, accessible status.

Their station information pages must be incorrect. These pages state that 183 of their 354 stations (52%) have no step-free access to any part of the station. (Actually that’s not accurate either, but still, there patently are Scotrail platforms / whole stations without wheelchair access.)

Rail station accessibility data

Posted on by Doug Paulley

The Rail Delivery Group‘s database “Knowledgebase” contains (among other things) all the station information used e.g. on the National Rail enquiries website, including all the station accessibility information. This data is available to everybody, but in a format only programmers can use. So with help, I’ve converted the station accessibility data (and some other key data) into a spreadsheet.

Here’s the Knowledgebase stations spreadsheet in Excel format (~2.5Mb), and here’s the Knowledgebase stations spreadsheet in .csv format (~5Mb). Here’s National Rail Enquiries Knowledgebase Data Feeds Specification (PDF, 900kb) which describes what each element (should) describe.

The spreadsheet is current as of 3rd February 2018. (My spreadsheet can update the data, but I’ve removed this function from the spreadsheets here because the update mechanism uses my username and password for the National Rail Data Portal.)

One may wish to consider:

  • the proportion of stations that have step-free access, overall and by station operator
  • the proportion of stations that have toilets compared to the proportion of stations that have disabled toilets (“NKS toilets”, after the Radar National Key Scheme) or no information about disabled toilets
  • stations that have step free access and are staffed but don’t have train ramps available
  • stations with temporarily broken lifts, and when the data on the station was last updated
  • staffed stations which don’t offer staff assistance to disabled people
  • stations with car parks but no Blue Badge spaces and/or no suitable drop off point for disabled people
  • stations with contradictory information, such as stating both “Step-free access coverage: No part of station” and “Both platforms are fully accessible from the street“

And whatever else you like, really.

If you would like me to update the spreadsheet, drop me a line.