Enabling Legislation or Dissembling Law? The Disability Discrimination Act 1995

Abstract

The surprising volte-face epitomised by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA 1995) is the product of a curious concoction of political forces and events. A government, which in the early 1990s had been unwilling to recognise the phenomenon of disability discrimination, had come slowly to a concession of the facts of social exclusion and marginalisation of a sizeable minority.' Recognising the mischief, however, was a necessary but insufficient step towards identifying the remedy. Official policy still clung to the talisman that education and persuasion, rather than legislation, represented the appropriate means to the end of a society within which disabled persons would be fully integrated and afforded equality of opportunity. The emergence of disability rights activism, seeking to emulate the experience of the civil rights movement among disabled Americans in the previous decade, and prepared to use all forms of political and extra-political action to advance its agenda, applied the political pressure for reform. Enthused by the legal advances attained in the United States via its comprehensive civil rights law the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 disabled Britons and their allies rallied to the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bills.2 These private members' measures were a constant goad to a government unwilling to burden businesses with prescriptive regulation but mindful of the cross-party support which the disability rights agenda attracted.' When in May 1994 the then latest version of the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill was defeated by cynical means of parliamentary procedure, little could it be imagined that this damaging setback would be the catalyst for government-sponsored reform. The furore surrounding these events and the reliance upon minority parties of a government riven by Euro-scepticism led to what was proposed to be a limited initiative in law reform. That was certainly the tone of the Green Paper of July 1994, and the White Paper and draft Bill that followed it in January 1995.4 Yet