Accessibility must lie at the heart of how we think and work at Brighton & Hove City Council both as a service provider and an employer.
We'll evidence this through systemic change. This means looking at our policies, practice, procedures, and services and challenging ourselves with the following questions:
- are our services proactively accessible and disability-inclusive?
- what barriers are we creating, how are these impacting those we serve, and what must we do to change and remove these barriers at their root?
- are we actively creating equitable voice, outcomes, and value for disabled people who live, work, and visit in Brighton & Hove? if not, why not, and what needs to change?
- are we aware of the barriers that may exist for disabled people from diverse backgrounds and preventing and removing those barriers?
There's good practice and engagement we can speak to, however, we also have significant work to do in terms of accessibility and disability inclusion.
Communities are rightly holding us to account. We need to work as one council and as individual services, alongside communities - not have our communities do all the work for us - to create an accessible city and council.
Councillors and staff alike realise that achieving the vision and the aims of this strategy will take some time which is why it's important to have a strategic approach setting out where we want to get to and how we plan to get there.
This is a continuing journey, and the strategy provides a foundation and a framework for the first 5 years of this journey. We'll keep it under review and expect it to become part of the operating principles of Brighton & Hove City Council for the foreseeable future.
Residents want to see action and change. So do we. We need a considered plan to achieve systemic change ensuring we truly understand accessibility and diverse disabled people’s requirements. In this way, inclusive, accessibility-informed practice is embedded in how we think, work, design and deliver services. We hope this strategy sets us on the right path.
- Councillor Leslie Pumm, Chair of the Equality, Community Safety and Human Rights Committee.
The Accessible City Strategy strategy sets out our:
The Accessible City Strategy is supported by a set of appendices that:
We're using the terms disabled person, disabled people, or a person with access requirements as inclusive terms to recognise the different views, preferences, and attitudes that residents and communities hold.
We acknowledge that disabilities are non-visible (including mental health problems) and visible. For more detail on the language we're using, visit the terminology section of the Accessible City Strategy.
We're aware that some people and communities do not identify as disabled, however, they experience barriers to our services because we have not considered or are unable to meet their access requirements, for example, some D/deaf or neurodivergent residents.
We commit to becoming more aware and nuanced in the use of terminology related to disabled people and those who experience access barriers to Brighton & Hove City Council services.
Our vision is to be a council that is welcoming, inclusive, and accessible, going beyond the legal minimum when providing barrier-free services that promote independence and equity of access, opportunity, and representation for disabled people and their diverse identities.
Brighton & Hove Councillors and Brighton & Hove City Council staff truly understand the varied lived experiences and systemic barriers faced by disabled people who live, work, and visit Brighton & Hove.
We all do the necessary work year after year to embed accessibility and disability inclusion in how we think and act as a service provider and employer.
We're a council that proactively uses its role as a civic leader to influence businesses, creatives, visitors, and other public services, to make accessibility part of Brighton & Hove’s culture and to lead by example.
Brighton & Hove and we, as Brighton & Hove City Council, are a beacon of change to residents, organisations and local authorities nationwide.
Our aim is to be a council that:
Our vision and aims in British Sign Language
The Accessible City Strategy spans the first 5 years of our longer-term commitment to disability inclusion. It underpins long-term commitment that enables accessibility and disability to become embedded as part of business as usual along with and equal to our other equality priorities.
Our timeframe realistically recognises what it will take, practically, to create long-term sustainable change across more than 397 services and 5 large directorates and teams of around 9,000 staff (including schools).
The Accessible City Strategy sets a foundation and framework for us to work towards an accessible and disability-inclusive council. From this foundation, we can develop focused actions over a 5-year period that build on our accessibility work, knowledge, and skillsets to date.
The Accessible City Strategy intends to:
As we work towards our aims, we recognise change will take time. In the interim, we'll aim to establish alternative approaches to ensuring access is as equal as possible for disabled people as it is for those who do not have access requirements.
We're deeply committed to:
We're setting this strategy up in conjunction with our Anti-Racism Strategy and future equality strategies.
The Accessible City Strategy is fully supported by our Executive Leadership Team and integrated with our Council Plan and Directorate Plans that are published on our website. It's also embedded in our Fair and Inclusive Action Plan and linked to our Equality and Inclusion policy statement and strategy statement.
In developing the Accessible City Strategy, we recognise the reality of full equal access for everyone may not always be possible due to a broad range of issues, and one person’s preferred access solution might create a barrier for someone else. However, intentionally inclusive design approaches can often find innovative or multi-layered solutions that provide access for a diverse range of disabled people.
We're seeking to influence change beyond ourselves, working closely with our statutory partners, commissioned providers, private businesses, community, and voluntary sector, to:
Through the process of developing Brighton & Hove City Council’s Accessible City and Anti-Racism Strategies, 3 key strategic themes for change in Brighton & Hove City Council have been identified and prioritised:
Priority actions have been identified under each theme for Brighton & Hove City Council, and for individual directorates, to support the creation of an accessible, disability-inclusive, anti-racist council, and city.
These actions are agile with scope to be refined and expanded over the course of the strategy. Many actions have already begun.
Our intention is that the strategic themes and priority actions will focus work towards embedding equality, diversity, inclusion, accessibility and intersectional non-silo-ed approaches into business-as-usual practice, mindsets, and service delivery.
We're prioritising critical action, however basic, that identifies and works towards tackling deep-seated root causes. This will create more impactful, intersectional and value-adding long-term changes to the experiences of disabled residents and communities living, working, and visiting Brighton & Hove.
Ongoing work and consultation will continue to explore ‘quick wins’ wherever possible within our resource, time, and capacity provisions and that does not detract from systemic change.
Detailed action plans with activities over 5 years of the strategy are being produced in consultation with the Disability Panel and the Wider Reference Group. They will be monitored regularly, internally, to further develop ownership, accountability, and long-term sustainable commitment, in addition to external reporting.
The themes have been aligned with the existing equality, diversity, and inclusion priorities of Brighton & Hove City Council for example Brighton & Hove City Council’s and directorates’ Fair and Inclusive Action Plan, as well as the British Deaf Association’s British Sign Language Charter. This is to avoid confusion, duplication, and increased reporting burden on services.
Through our priority actions, we want to create a council that:
We do this by taking a nuanced anti-racist, equitable, and disability-inclusive approach, considering intersectional barriers, impacts, and requirements
Engagement - communicating and collaborating in British Sign Language
Through our priority actions, we want to create a council that:
Data - collecting and using in British Sign Language
Through our priority actions, we want to create a council that:
Policy and practice - reviewing and changing in British Sign Language
Using feedback from the Disability Panel, the Wider Reference Group, community groups, individuals, and data, 3 council-wide priority actions have been identified and prioritised for the duration of the strategy.
Each of Brighton & Hove City Council’s directorates have identified its priority actions for how it will take forward council-wide actions in relation to its work and service delivery.
The directorate-level actions will evolve and may change over the lifetime of the strategy, building year on year in response to services’ learning, communities’ feedback, and evaluation of their impact.
Corporate support services such as Brighton & Hove City Council’s Policy and Partnerships and Learning, Inclusion and Organisational Development teams, will work collaboratively to provide advice, guidance, support, expertise, development opportunities, and co-ordination.
Sharing of learning will enable all directorates in Brighton & Hove City Council to build consistent practice and delivery.
Our Priority Actions in British Sign Language
Increase and improve our communication and engagement with disabled residents, service users, customers, visitors, and tenants, aligned to a new engagement strategy being developed for the whole council.
Our engagement should be accessible, inclusively adjusted, nuanced, and intersectional and be used proactively to show changes to council policy and practice.
Improve the collection, analysis, and application of qualitative, quantitative, and intersectional data regarding disabled residents, service users, customers, visitors, and tenants to better understand their access and experience of services, using this proactively to inform service improvement.
Engagement: communicating and collaborating and Data: collecting and using in British Sign Language
Identify, review and co-produce key policies, plans, strategies, and work, embedding inclusive-design principles to better understand their impact, remove barriers and improve outcomes for disabled people, with intersectional insights.
This is done alongside our own intersectional disability-inclusive council-wide learning and development to embed accessibility and anti-racist practice as a default.
Brighton & Hove City Council consists of 3 corporate directorates with each of the corporate directors being members of the council’s Corporate Leadership Team
The 3 directorates in Brighton & Hove City Council are:
There are 3 additional directors who are members of the Corporate Leadership Team and responsible for the following:
Read more about the council's management and structure.
You can find out more about how we're structured and the work we're already doing to listen, work with and deliver more accessible services and create a more accessible city, in Appendix 5.
Policy and practice: reviewing and changing in British Sign Language
To do this we will:
Introduce an iterative and streamlined Equalities Checklist working with the Equality, Diversity & Inclusions team.
This will be focused on preparing and implementing new City Operations Projects and Plans to ensure that equality, accessibility, and intersectional considerations are embedded in projects from the beginning.
This will be piloted through the Highway Access Strategy review and update. It can then be rolled out to all City Operations and Brighton & Hove City Council.
Improve access to our services for all equality groups.
Use some whole service Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) to help us understand more about our service users and to inform service development including how services are accessed.
Improve engagement and visibility of our accessibility-related work demonstrating where we go beyond national policy and more.
Train and upskill our understanding as individuals, leadership team and service via learning and development delivered by the lived experience of disabled people’s organisations.
The objective of the training is for officers to:
City Operations Actions in British Sign Language
1. Evaluate and review current accessibility, engagement, consultation, and co-production arrangements across FCW, ensuring they hear from disabled and other not heard groups.
Ensure service delivery and any planned changes, including the development of an inclusion charter for education, are using this learning to improve engagement and accessibility for and with disabled residents.
2. Conduct a review of learning from service and change Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) to better inform wider service delivery, improving accessibility and equity for diverse disabled people as a focus.
3. Design and implement a programme to review all directorate-wide policies, procedures, and operational guides, including commissioning and Brighton & Hove’s Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Strategy to ensure the learning from actions 1 and 2 above are acted upon and reflected in our ways of working, becoming more accessible and intersectional in our policy, practice, thinking, and culture.
Families, Children and Wellbeing in British Sign Language
1. Improve the collection and use of quantitative and qualitative data in planning from an accessibility perspective recognising intersectionality. We will:
2. Evaluate and improve accessibility of service delivery and access to services. We will:
3. Improve understanding and use of local data relating to disability (and any intersectional issues) in the context of Homes and Adult Social Care services, identifying gaps and applying accessibility-informed intersectional approaches to analysing and reporting on data dashboards.
4. Explore cross-connecting work with appropriate City Operations Services to create accessibility-informed improvements to Brighton & Hove's built environments.
5. Ensure that Homes and Adult Social Care staff are aware of the corporate digital inclusion strategy, networking group and local resources to improve customers' digital skills and address digital inequality.
6. Identify best practices in accessible and inclusive council housing design and ensure that this is reflected in our approach to solving maintenance, housing, and building access issues (including day-to-day repairs and capital works as well as new build, and approach to building design and maintenance).
7. Incorporate the feedback from a focus group of staff who are residents into council-wide EDI learning and improvements around accessibility.
Adult Social Care in British Sign Language
Homes in British Sign Language
1. Develop an understanding of reasonable adjustments across Brighton & Hove City Council and directorate to enable timely adjustments to be put in place for our staff, service users and customers, while we better understand requirements, identify barriers to access and reasonable adjustment provision, and develop council-wide solutions.
2. Create accessible documents and communications for our staff, service users and customers following accessibility toolkit guidelines.
3. Embed disability-inclusivity and accessibility by default in Brighton & Hove City Council’s 2023 to 2028 Corporate Plan.
4. Develop and implement a council-wide engagement strategy, to better understand the views of disabled people including their intersecting identities, and to facilitate a co-production approach
5. Create an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) resource hub with relevant toolkits and resources that support diverse service providers and advocacy groups, to improve our collective awareness and communications approach as a council.
People and Innovation Directorate Actions in British Sign Language
Detailed action plans with measures of success are being developed to implement this strategy.
Performance against our prioritised actions will have community accountability via:
Key highlights of performance, progress and barriers will also be reported to Brighton & Hove's Equality and Inclusion Partnership.
Our progress will be monitored through Brighton & Hove City Council’s internal performance management framework.
Each directorate provides a progress update to the Corporate Equality Delivery Group that oversees all Brighton & Hove City Council’s equality, diversity, and inclusion work.
Additionally, each directorate has its own Equality Delivery Group to lead and deliver its equality work, ensuring the directorate continues to embed equality, disability accessibility, anti-racism, and intersectional thinking in how it acts and delivers as a service provider and employer.
Actions will also be monitored for leadership through individual staff performance reviews with their manager.
More information on action planning and monitoring is available in Appendix 4.
This strategy and action plan has been created through dialogue with disabled people’s organisations, disabled people, and Brighton & Hove City Council’s Disabled Workers and Carers Network.
Thank you to the many individuals and groups that gave their time, energy, and resilience to talk with us about the development of this strategy.
We're very grateful to:
Disabled people’s voices are vital to this work, and we've established 2 engagement groups that are at the heart of developing and implementing our Accessible City Strategy.
These are the:
These engagement groups centre the voices of people with lived experience of disability and speak to the disability activist slogan ‘nothing about us, without us’.
Both engagement groups are meaningful groups that contribute their expertise and experience to making the strategy as inclusive as possible.
As both groups evolve, we're committed to developing our intersectional perspectives and increasing representation from the lived experience of disabled people from:
The Disability Panel provides strategic, expert, and impartial advice to us on developing, implementing, monitoring, and reviewing the Accessible City Strategy and resulting action plans.
The panel is currently chaired by the chief executive of Possability People and Panel membership is made up of disabled individuals and representatives from local disabled people’s organisations.
The organisations currently represented on the Disability Panel are:
Meetings are also attended by our externally engaged disability consultant Freeney Williams.
We recruited 4 disabled individuals to the Disability Panel following a public-facing recruitment campaign and a shortlisting and interview process.
Disabled person organisations and disabled individuals are paid for preparing for and attending 4 meetings per year, and members provide advice and guidance to us on relevant topics in relation to the strategy.
We recognise that not all people with access requirements identify as disabled, including many Deaf people. For this reason, a representative from our Deaf Services Liaison Forum (DSLF) has a place on the Disability Panel and contributes input from the perspective of Deaf Community members.
The Chair of the Disability Panel facilitates a feedback loop between the Disability Panel and the Wider Reference Group. The Disability Panel will also monitor and review the Accessible City Strategy.
The Wider Reference Group provides critical input and feedback to the Disability Panel and shares experiences of barriers and ideas for solutions, with clear boundaries of engagement established through agreed purpose and guidance documents for both groups.
The role of the Wider Reference Group is to provide a safe, inclusive space for local groups and organisations to give their views and take part in discussions on how Brighton & Hove and Brighton & Hove City Council services can become more accessible.
The Group is a membership body, open to representatives from disabled people’s organisations that support and empower disabled residents of Brighton & Hove – ideally with lived experience of disability themselves.
There will be future opportunities for individuals with lived experience of disability to get involved with sharing their views.
The strategy currently publishes priority actions only. These will be fulfilled by a number of activities which have SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) action plans developed internally with relevant council directorates across the 5-year strategy time period.
Delivery will be ongoing, and actions and progress will be reviewed regularly through our quarterly internal performance management and reporting framework.
Consultation, advisory and other activities will be conducted within the terms of reference of the Disability Panel and the Wider Reference Group specified in the purpose and guidance documents.
We're using some key terminology in the strategy to support the delivery and creation of an accessible city.
Discussions will continue to take place throughout the lifespan of this strategy to ensure language is kept up to date.
Any terminology used in this strategy will be reviewed on a regular basis and updated as necessary
Terminology in British Sign Language
An accessible city is one where people with access requirements, who live, work, and visit Brighton & Hove, have, independent, inclusive, and barrier-free access to:
The Accessible City Strategy impacts all areas of city life such as
Accessible City in British Sign Language
We're using the terms ‘disabled person’, ‘disabled people’, or ‘a person with access requirements’ as generic terms to recognise the different views, preferences, and attitudes that residents and communities hold.
We're aware that some people and communities do not identify as disabled, however, they experience barriers to our services because we have not considered or are unable to meet their access requirements, for example, D/deaf residents.
This is recognised in our use of the social model of disability and the cultural model of Deafness.
We commit to becoming more aware and nuanced in the use of terminology related to disabled people and those who experience access barriers to Brighton & Hove City Council services.
Disabled People in British Sign Language
The definition below is taken from the Equality Act 20101 from Guidance on the definition of disability on GOV.UK.
A person is considered to be disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if they have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on their ability to do normal daily activities.
What ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ mean:
Progressive conditions are defined as those that get worse over time. People with progressive conditions can be classed as disabled. However, people automatically meet the disability definition under the Equality Act 2010 from the day they are diagnosed with HIV infection, cancer, or multiple sclerosis”.
The Equality Act includes guidance on conditions that aren’t covered by the disability definition including, for example, addiction to non-prescribed drugs or alcohol.
The social model of disability distinguishes between 'impairment' (functional limitations of mind, body, or senses) and 'disability' (disadvantage or restrictions of activity placed by society).
A key concept of the social model is that society disables people by the way things are arranged. Organise things differently, and they are enabled - though the impairment has not changed.
The social model regards disability as ‘The loss of or limitation of opportunities to take part in the normal life of the community on an equal level with others due to physical or social barriers'.
The above definition focuses on removing barriers that prevent disabled people's participation as citizens.
Disabled people include, but are not limited to, people with:
Disability in British Sign Language
A non-visible disability is a disability or health condition that is not immediately obvious. It's estimated that 70 to 80% of disabilities are non-visible and can defy stereotypes of what people might ‘think’ disabled people ‘look’ like (source: Living with Non-Visible Disabilities blog post).
Some non-visible disabilities include:
People with non-visible disabilities may experience a lack of understanding, and disbelief, and may be assumed by others not to be disabled.
Many people with non-visible disabilities report unequal opportunities and difficulties accessing the services and support they need. They have reported challenges in access and inclusion in employment and in higher education and further education.
Difficulties accessing other public services and infrastructure, such as transport, parking, sidewalks, mobility aids, and health and social care, can also impact disabled people’s ability to participate in work and education (source: UK Parliament POSTnote Invisible Disabilities in Education and Employment).
It's possible for people to be disabled visibly and non-visibly and for the two to be related or unrelated.
The choice of ‘non-visible disabilities’ as a preferred term to talk about disabilities that are not immediately obvious is influenced by the negative connotations, which can be associated with expressions such as ‘hidden disability’ (which can suggest that people are purposefully hiding their disability) or ‘invisible disability’ (this term can imply that the disability doesn’t really exist and may be all in an individual’s head) (source: The Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee (DPTAC) position statement on non-visible disabilities).
We absolutely recognise non-visible disabilities as having parity with visible disabilities and seek to ensure voices are represented in balance across all forums and for people with marginalised and intersecting identities who are also disabled in multiple and complex ways.
We seek to learn from the experiences of people living with non-visible disabilities and to remove barriers to our services and employment in Brighton & Hove City Council.
Our internal disability awareness training will highlight non-visible disabilities and guidance on improving access for people with these conditions and experiences.
Non visible disabilities in British Sign Language
Disabled people are protected from direct and indirect discrimination under the Equality Act.
Brighton & Hove City Council is committed to our legal duty to not discriminate against disabled individuals, and our anticipatory duties to consider in advance what we need to do to make our services accessible to our disabled customers, residents, and visitors.
We protect and support the rights of disabled individuals. We'll listen to and learn from the experiences of disabled individuals.
Where discrimination has occurred, we'll encourage and support disabled individuals to make complaints.
We'll work with our colleagues to ensure that their situations are fully explored, mistakes corrected, mitigations made where possible and that lessons learned are applied as deeply and systemically as possible to reduce future experiences of discrimination.
We recognise that disabled people experiencing ableism may also be experiencing sexism, racism, homo-/bi-/transphobia, islamophobia, antisemitism and more.
We also recognise that disabled people might experience discrimination in relation to other life experiences or circumstances not covered by the Equality Act.
We commit to working as inclusively as we can with disabled individuals experiencing marginalisation and exclusion, above and beyond the legal protections outlined in the Equality Act.
Individual rights of disabled people in British Sign Language
Ableism is discrimination in favour of non-disabled people.
Disablism is discrimination or prejudice against disabled people. Both terms describe disability discrimination, but the emphasis is different.
Disablism emphasises discrimination against disabled people, while ableism emphasises discrimination in favour of non- disabled people (source: Disablism and ableism Scope UK).
We live in an ableist society that assumes that the ‘normal’ way to live is as a non-disabled person, and that views disabled people as ‘less than’ in various ways.
Examples of ableist behaviours, assumptions and stereotypes include:
We recognise the complex impacts of ableism and disablism and seek to grow as a council that works against ableism and disablism in all their forms.
We have zero tolerance for any form of discrimination against disabled people.
Ableism and Disablism in British Sign Language
The term audism was coined by Tom Humphries in his 1977 doctoral dissertation Communicating Across Cultures (Deaf-Hearing) and Language Learning. He defines audism as "the notion that one is superior based on one's ability to hear or to behave in the manner of one who hears".
Audism results in a negative stigma toward people who do not hear.
Like other systems of oppression, audism judges, labels, and limits individuals on the basis of whether they hear and speak.
Audism takes place in all levels of government and society in the form of direct, indirect, and/or systemic discrimination and discriminatory behaviour or prejudice against Deaf people (source: The Canadian Association of the Deaf on Audism).
Both Deaf and hearing people can carry out audism. For many Deaf people raised in hearing families who did not learn to sign, audism may be internalised.
Examples of audism include:
- jumping in to help a Deaf person communicate
- asking a Deaf person to read your lips or write when s/he has indicated this isn’t preferred
- asking a Deaf person to ‘tone down’ their facial expressions because they are making others uncomfortable
- devoting a significant amount of instructional time for a Deaf child to lipreading and speech therapy, rather than educational subjects
- refusal, or failure to use, sign language in front of a person who depends on sign language to communicate if you know how to sign
- denying accessibilities, like an interpreter or captions
- insisting that Deaf and hard-of-hearing people conform to the hearing community
- assuming that Deaf people can’t do anything, or lowering your expectations of their skills because they cannot hear
- approaching Deafness as a tragedy
- patronising behaviours, including belittling a Deaf person’s voice.
(Source: YouTube video shared by DeafCOG on Audism).
We recognise audism as a distinct form of discrimination and recognise its impact on Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. We're committed to increasing our understanding of audism and how to eliminate it.
We aim to identify and continuously improve our accessibility, inclusion and support specifically for D/deaf, deafened, and hard of hearing.
As signatories of the British Deaf Association’s British Sign Language Charter, we pledge to:
There are also simple things that can improve access for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people in our city, including the following:
All public spaces, including sidewalks, parks, and public buildings, should be designed with accessibility in mind. This includes ensuring that there are:
Additionally, all public buildings should be equipped with assistive technologies such as closed captioning, visual alarms, and tactile maps, which can benefit everyone.
To support and explore these and more potential actions and our pledge, the formation of a working group will be explored. This working group will help bring focus within the wider strategy to the requirements of Deaf people while connecting across to wider intersectional accessibility and disability-inclusion work.
Our Deaf Services Liaison Forum (DSLF) brings together organisations that have a stake, expertise and interest in championing and working to increase equality for D/deaf communities in Brighton & Hove.
The DSLF gathers a range of perspectives including feedback from D/deaf residents to inform service development and changes and provide an ‘expert’ panel where changes can be ‘tested’.
Current DSLF projects include establishing a working group to take forward the Forum's strategic actions which include engagement with the local D/deaf community via an annual open day.
A separate working group is developing ‘mystery shopping’ activities with local services to learn how accessible they are to D/deaf people and offer feedback and support for services to become more accessible.
We prefer to use the term inclusive adjustments instead of just reasonable adjustments. This term and approach have been recommended further to consultation with our key stakeholder groups comprised of disabled residents. Inclusive adjustments go beyond just ‘reasonable’ adjustments.
Reasonable adjustments are recommended in law, and it's our anticipatory and legal duty to provide these as an employer, public services provider, and local authority.
Read advice from:
Inclusive adjustments take a holistic view that considers diverse, unique adjustments in addition to reasonable adjustments recommended by law.
Employers and service providers must make inclusive adjustments to ensure disabled workers or customers (with visible or non-visible disabilities) are not substantially disadvantaged when doing their jobs or accessing services.
"A failure to provide inclusive adjustments, to disabled individuals or to groups, and all types of workers (including trainees, apprentices, contract workers and business partners) is unlawful discrimination" (source: Government guidance on reasonable adjustments for those with learning disabilities).
“Reasonable adjustments are changes that organisations and people providing services or public functions have to make for you if your disability puts you at a disadvantage compared with others who are not disabled. They have an anticipatory duty to make these reasonable adjustments. This means they must plan in advance to meet the access needs of disabled people.” (source: advice from Mind.org.uk on making reasonable adjustments and advice from GOV.UK on reasonable adjustments as a legal duty).
Small adjustments can help treat people equally and fairly. Every person is different and requires different changes to feel included and supported.
It's a disabled person’s right to expect and be able to ask for inclusive adjustments in any space they access and exist in.
Engagement, communication and experience adjustments may include:
Physical adjustments to the working environment may include:
Changing work patterns and hours may include:
Sources include:
Inclusive adjustments in British Sign Language
We recognise the difference between equality and equity. As a council, we commit to equity for disabled individuals and communities.
We recognise lack of access amounts to exclusion and discrimination, which results in unequal outcomes for disabled people.
Equality is the state of being equal in status, rights, and opportunities. This refers to making sure individuals or groups of people are given the same resources or rights to opportunities.
Focusing on equality can sometimes result in a ‘one size fits all’ approach that can exclude marginalised individuals and communities.
Equity differs from equality. Equity occurs when disproportionate barriers to access, opportunity, voice, and impact are understood, recognised, and removed differently for different groups of people instead of doing the same things for all people.
Inequity affects many people, but most commonly historically it has marginalised communities such as:
Inequity results in the unequal outcomes for disabled people that are described in this strategy.
A National Audit Office report from 2019 outlines:
Disabled people earn less if they're excluded from the workplace or from progression within. They expend their own money, time, and labour fighting for access that others have the duty to provide.
Disabled people have worse health outcomes when they're excluded from health services. Worse educational outcomes when excluded from education. Exclusion from transport leads to more exclusion from workplaces, healthcare, education, and so on.
It's society's failure to provide access that creates and compounds inequality. This is at the heart of the social model of disability.
We recognise that ableism and disablism in wider society and in organisations including Brighton & Hove City Council amount to the exclusion of disabled individuals and communities from society in a range of ways. This exclusion is compounded for disabled people experiencing other forms of discrimination in addition to ableism and disablism.
This exclusion and lack of access result in the unequal outcomes for disabled people that we have laid out in this strategy.
"The social model of disability, developed over the last 40 years by disabled people, is a radically different model to the traditional medical and charitable approach to disability" (source: social model of disability Scope UK).
The social model of disability states that some people may have impairments, but that the exclusion and discrimination people with impairments face is not an inevitable consequence of having an impairment but is caused instead by the way society is run and organised.
The social model of disability holds that people with impairments are ‘disabled’ by the barriers operating in society that exclude and discriminate against them.
Sometimes referred to as a ‘barriers-approach’, the social model provides a ‘route map’ that identifies both the barriers that disabled people with impairments and how these barriers can be removed, minimised, or countered by other forms of support.
Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets, or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people cannot or should not do certain things.
The social model of disability is dynamic and effective in that it focuses on barriers and solutions to such barriers and, in doing so, maps out an approach to inclusion and equality that is of benefit to society, not just disabled people.
The model is not without criticism or challenge. We recognise the use of the term impairment is deeply offensive to some people as it confers the notion of ‘less than’ and ‘others’ people from a ‘norm’. When using the social model, we'll seek to avoid this term and focus on using the model to identify barriers to our services.
We also recognise that for some people who identify as disabled, the medical model is important as they seek better support for their long-term possibly fluctuating health conditions.
We further recognise that the social model has some limitations, and the biopsychosocial model offers a different inclusive framework. We'll explore its appropriate application long-term to our work as part of the strategy’s implementation.
Social model of disability in British Sign Language
Intersectionality is a concept introduced and developed by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality means to recognise the complexity of the many parts and identities of each person that co-exist and impact one another, particularly when experiencing inequity and exclusion, and the more diverse lived experiences a person has.
It's important that as a council and a city, our disability and accessibility work is considerate of the multiple identities diverse disabled people hold and how these can create multiple layers of exclusion, barriers, and discrimination.
These include faith, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity including migratised communities and those who appear or present to be outsiders to the United Kingdom. This increases their vulnerability and risk of experiencing inequity, discrimination, barriers, and exclusion when also disabled, within Brighton & Hove, the disability community, in interactions with local service providers, and all other areas of daily life.
Recognising whose voice is missing in the disability space also means recognising who dominates it. The voices which are more often heard include White, middle-class, female, people with visible disabilities, parents, and older carers.
There's an under-representation of young adults, people with non-visible disabilities, Black and Racially Minoritised, LGBTQIA+, young carers and single people.
Creating equity and representation through intersectionality in disabled spaces and groups is important to create equity and culturally sensitive outcomes for all disabled people.
If diverse voices do not have equal power in accessing Brighton & Hove City Council or key spaces/groups, it's critical to intentionally include and diversify any groups Brighton & Hove City Council creates and ensure we're reaching out and working to platform diverse voices.
This is work we've identified and will continue to do through positive action and other efforts. Intersectionality in British Sign Language
The Anti-Oppression Network describes allyship as:
"An active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalised group." (source: The Anti Oppression Network on Allyship).
They outline it as a ‘lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalised individuals and/or groups of people’ and note that allyship is not self-defined. Our work and our efforts must be recognised by the people we seek to ally ourselves with.
As a council, we see ourselves as being on a journey of growing our allyship with diverse disabled individuals and communities through our ongoing commitments to:
We do not expect awards or special recognition for confronting issues that disabled people have to live with every day. If we do receive such recognition, we redirect attention to the groups we're supporting, and the issues they face.
Latham Thomas, who coined the term ‘optical allyship’, describes it as:
"Allyship that only serves at the surface level to platform the ’ally’, it makes a statement but doesn’t go beneath the surface and is not aimed at breaking away from the systems of power that oppress." (source: Latham Thomas, a Visiting Professor of the Practice of Gender & Sexuality Studies at Brown University on meaningful allyship).
We strive for our allyship to be non-performative and to operate with integrity and humility as we foster a culture of allyship within Brighton & Hove City Council, and in connection to our disability and anti-racism work.
Allyship in British Sign Language
Microaggressions are commonplace daily verbal, behavioural or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatised or culturally marginalized groups, including disabled people.
Microaggressions are often thought to be intentional compared to incivilities but both can have a significant impact on those affected and can amount to harassment.
Disability-related microaggressions are a form of discrimination and ableism and include:
As a council, we recognise the impact of microaggressions and recognise that they can constitute discrimination and harassment.
We seek to eliminate unlawful discrimination by building a disability-inclusive culture in Brighton & Hove City Council through training, case study learning work, and supporting positive behaviours.
Micro aggressions and mirco incivilities in British Sign Language
"Neurodiversity is an umbrella term used to describe many ways in which our brains are wired - the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species." (sources: The Local Government Association on Neurodiversity and The Brain Charity on 'What is neurodiversity? Explaining how some people’s brains work differently' ).
"It's an essential form of our human diversity, although it's still quite a new and often misunderstood and overlooked facet of diversity, both in the workplace and in society in general" (source: AutisticUK.org on Neurodiversity).
"Neurodiversity is the concept that there are many ways in which our brains function and process information" (source: VerywellMind.com on 'What is Neurodivergence and What Does It Mean to Be Neurodivergent?').
"It is not a trait which can or cannot be possessed by a person, as, by definition, an individual cannot be diverse or have diversity" (source: Neuroqueer.com and the writings of Dr. Nick Walker on 'Neurodiversity: some basic terms & definitions').
Neurodivergence is the term used to describe individuals whose brains function differently in one or more ways than what's considered standard or typical according to dominant societal norms (neurotypical). The term was initially used to specifically refer to autistic people, but it's used in much broader sense now.
A neurotypical person’s brain is characterised by functions, behaviours and processing which is expected by society and can be considered standard or typical.
"It's estimated that around one in seven people in the United Kingdom (more than 15%) are neurodivergent." (source: NHS Cambridge University Hospitals on 'What is neurodiversity?').
There are many different types of neurodivergence including:
In the past, the idea of one ‘correct’ style of neurocognitive functioning and one ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ type of neurotypical mind or brain, which falls within dominant societal standards, was unfortunately common.
"The medical or psychiatric classification of neurodivergence as pathology or abnormality, which should be ‘cured’, reflects cultural prejudice and oppression." (source: AutisticUK.org on Neurodiversity).
"The concept of neurodiversity steers away from interpreting differences as deficits and builds on the social model of disability, which considers people to be disabled not by their differences or impairments, but by society’s failure to accommodate their needs. Neurodiversity applies this concept to our brains" (source: The Brain Charity on 'What is neurodiversity? Explaining how some people’s brains work differently').
Health and Adult Social Care Directorate (HASC) recruited a commissioning lead for autism, whose focus will be initially on developing Brighton & Hove City Council’s strategy for autistic adults without a diagnosis of a learning disability.
The Autism Partnership Board for autistic adults, carers, and their representative organisations was launched this year.
Brighton & Hove City Council is committed to raising awareness and improving our understanding of neurodiversity, building on neurodivergent individuals’ strengths and creativity in the workplace, and anticipating and meeting their access requirements with the aim of finding better ways of working and serving the neurodivergent community of Brighton & Hove.
Neurodiversity in British Sign Language
The Department of Health and Social Care (2001) defines a learning disability as:
"A significantly reduced ability to understand new or complex information, to learn new skills (impaired intelligence), with a reduced ability to cope independently (impaired social functioning), which started before adulthood" (source: The Department of Health and Social Care’s Valuing People – A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century on GOV.UK).
"A learning disability is a lifelong incurable condition, affecting a person throughout their whole life, however, early implementation of the right kind of support and therapy can help individuals to become as independent as possible in later life.
People who have a learning disability experience difficulties in learning new things, developing new skills, doing everyday activities, interacting with others, and communicating.
The level of support required by a person to live an independent, full, and rewarding life depends on the individual and the degree of learning disability, which can be classified as mild, moderate, severe, or profound." (source: MENCAP's guidance on 'What learning disability means').
The most up-to-date data on learning disabilities from Mencap estimates that there are approximately 1.5 million people with a learning disability in the United Kingdom, including over 950,000 adults aged 18 or over.
The figures have been calculated using learning disability prevalence rates from Public Health England (2016) and population data from the Office for National Statistics (2020).
The number of working-age adults with a learning disability in Brighton & Hove has been estimated at around 5,000 people.
It's essential to understand that having a learning disability is a different experience for everyone affected and no two people with learning disability are the same.
You can hear people with learning disabilities talking about what it means to them on Mencap's website.
A learning disability is different to a learning difficulty, which affects specific areas of learning (reading, writing, spelling, mathematics, physical coordination) and includes conditions such as:
It's possible for an individual with a learning disability to also have one or more learning difficulties.
"People with learning disabilities are one of the most vulnerable, socially excluded, and disadvantaged groups in our society" (source: Brighton & Hove Adult Learning Disability Strategy: The Big Plan 2021 to 2026).
People with learning disabilities encounter various inequalities, barriers, and challenges in everyday life, such as:
A situation when a learning disability is also a non-visible disability can increase challenges and barriers to access and inclusion.
"Inequalities faced by people with learning disabilities can be further intensified by the effect of intersectionality, for example, the needs of people with learning disabilities from Black and Racially Minoritised communities are often overlooked" (source: The Department of Health and Social Care’s Valuing People – A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century on GOV.UK).
Brighton & Hove City Council believes that people with learning disabilities should be:
"Removing barriers and improving accessibility in Brighton & Hove, especially enhancing communication by providing information in accessible form like Easy Read, can maximise the inclusion and participation of people with learning disabilities, help to involve them as much as possible in their own care and in community life, allow individuals to achieve independence, live ordinary, fulfilling lives, make informed choices, realise their potential and be a valued part of the community. Inclusion should always have key principles of respect, independence, and choice and at its heart" (source: The Department of Health and Social Care’s Valuing People – A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century on GOV.UK).
Health and Adult Social Care Directorate (HASC) launched the Adult Learning Disability Strategy: The Big Plan 2021 to 2026, which aims to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities in Brighton & Hove by ensuring that they and their families get the advice, support, and services they need.
The Big Plan is based on 6 priority areas:
Our values connect strongly with our commitment to place accessibility and the requirements of diverse disabled people at the heart of the way we design and deliver our services.
Our values shape the way that council staff review their own conduct and the performance of others.
Each member of staff has a Performance and Development Plan which sets out their current work objectives so that they, their manager, and the organisation are clear on what they are being asked to achieve and that they have the relevant training and support not only to do this but also to develop as people and professionals.
We believe strongly in a motivated workforce that feels ownership of their individual roles and the wider aims of our organisation.
We aim to develop and strengthen internal accountability to ensure long-term sustainable change.
Below are our core values with a description of how they connect to prioritising accessibility in every aspect of our work as your council.
Work together and contribute to the creation of helpful and successful teams and partnerships across Brighton & Hove City Council and beyond.
Our Equalities Team, Corporate Equality Delivery Group (CEDG) and Directorate Equality Delivery Groups (DEDGs) are involved in supporting council teams and services to intentionally centre accessibility at the heart of their work.
We engage with our local D/deaf, disabled, neurodiverse, LGBTQIA+, and Black and Racially Minoritised communities, to learn about how we can best meet their access requirements.
Work in a way that makes the best and most sustainable use of our resources, always looking at alternative ways of getting stuff done and asking, "how can I improve that?".
Our leadership, Directorate Equality Delivery Groups (DEDGs) and the services that they represent work hard to identify and implement sustainable and efficient ways to reduce barriers for disabled people and those with access requirements.
Embrace diversity with kindness and consideration and recognise the value of everyone.
We recognise the value of all people and are keenly aware of stigmatising societal stereotypes that often represent disabled people as ‘less than’, including presuming them to be unproductive, helpless, unable to care for themselves or unable to make their own decisions.
We actively challenge these stereotypes and value the diversity of all Brighton & Hove residents and Brighton & Hove City Council colleagues.
Share and communicate with honesty about our service and ourselves, whenever appropriate.
Our Equalities Team is committed to providing psychologically safe and inclusive spaces where we can:
This work is supported by our Corporate Equality Delivery Group (CEDG) and Directorate Equality Delivery Groups (DEDGs) including various leads undertaking specific equalities and inclusion work across every directorate across Brighton & Hove City Council.
Have ideas that challenge the 'tried and tested', use evidence of what works, listen to feedback, and come up with different solutions.
We're committed to hearing and learning from creative suggestions from our disability engagement groups – our Disability Panel and Wider Reference Group. Both groups prioritise listening to the voices of people with lived experience of disability, who can share with us:
Adopt our customer promise: ‘We will make it clear how you can contact or access our services. We will understand and get things done. We will be clear and treat you with respect’ for colleagues, partners, members, and customers.
We seek to meet these commitments in every interaction with our internal and external stakeholders, and to remove barriers to equal access for all our disabled customers, ensuring our consultation and engagement becomes accessible.
We can access British Sign Language translation, including SignLive, for our D/deaf customers. We're working to make Easy Read versions of our work more widely available and facilitate Braille printing where we can.
We're also reviewing how residents and visitors make contact and find their way to the services they seek.
Council Values and Accessible Strategy in British Sign Language
The City Operations Directorate works with city and regional partners to develop and deliver services that support low-carbon economic growth and maintain an attractive, connected, and well-run city for residents, businesses, and visitors.
City Operations helps to:
City Operations leads a programme for Brighton & Hove to become carbon neutral by 2030, introducing long-term solutions to safeguard the planet for future generations.
Decarbonisation is an important driver for City Operations’ work and there's a strong focus on measures that reduce carbon emissions from council buildings, land, fleet, city developments and transport infrastructure.
Accessibility and inclusivity of services are key priorities for the directorate, and we recognise we must do more. This includes:
We also recognise the need to maximise opportunities for cross-council work with other directorates. Examples of this include:
Delivers statutory waste, recycling, and street cleansing functions for Brighton & Hove, and manages Brighton & Hove’s tree stock, rights of way, parks, and open spaces.
The service also offers paid-for waste collections and delivers a graffiti reduction service and Brighton & Hove City Council’s fleet strategy, leading the way in decarbonising council vehicles.
Fulfils the statutory Planning Authority role by shaping city developments through Brighton & Hove City Council's City Plan, ensuring city strategies are delivered through new development and regeneration.
Ensures there's good urban design and place-making, accessible places, sustainable development, and protection of heritage assets.
Building Control ensures compliance with building regulations including accessibility for new buildings.
The service collects contributions from developers called ‘Section 106’ and ‘Community Infrastructure Levy’ payments to:
The service also leads Brighton & Hove City Council’s work with city and regional partners to develop strategies, support activities and deliver interventions that build a strong and sustainable economy.
It manages work to deliver on key sustainability commitments including:
Delivers a safe and sustainable city transport network that supports economic growth and carbon reduction, by maintaining and improving the resilience of Brighton & Hove’s highway infrastructure.
This includes:
The service also manages the transport network by:
Digital Innovation provide, develop, and support Brighton & Hove City Council’s technology infrastructure and digital capabilities, creating better access for staff, councillors and customers that meet accessibility regulations, while ensuring business continuity for Brighton & Hove City Council’s services.
Focuses on the recovery and growth of Brighton & Hove’s unique arts, culture, museums, events, and tourism sectors, working extensively with cultural partners.
The service supports people’s health and wellbeing by progressing the 10-year plan for revitalised sports facilities and investing in key leisure assets, including the new development ‘Kingsway to the Sea’.
The service supports Brighton & Hove’s multi-million-pound visitor economy, using Brighton & Hove City Council assets such as the Brighton Centre, seafront, and the Visit Brighton service.
The service:
The Sports Facilities Investment Plan 2021 to 2031 sets out key principles for investing in our sports and leisure facilities, one of which is to ensure that they're all fully accessible and inclusive.
We want our facilities to provide opportunities, reduce barriers and encourage more people to be more physically active.
We want all our residents, including disabled people and residents with long-term health conditions, to experience improved physical and mental health and well-being outcomes through increased participation in sports and physical activity.
The steps we're taking to make our city and services more accessible and inclusive include:
We're improving accessibility to the seafront through a range of projects. Blue Badge parking has been improved, with the new road layout at Madeira Drive adding 27 additional parking spaces. Additional Blue Badge bays are also being planned for the seafront near the King Alfred Leisure Centre.
The Black Rock boardwalk has proved extremely popular with residents and visitors since it opened last year, while the Kingsway to the Sea project will provide a new fully accessible route running the full length of the park.
Near Palace Pier, a wheelchair-accessible area has been created on the lower prom, directly below the Brighton Centre.
A new wheelchair-accessible beach pathway at Saltdean is now completed.
We are also:
We recognise there's always space to consider innovative and co-produced solutions that intentionally factor in accessibility and disability-inclusive requirements.
Our prioritised actions, process, practice improvements and planned upskilling inform our commitment to this strategy, and to becoming more inclusive.
As a directorate, we connect with Brighton & Hove’s disabled community in a variety of ways to ensure our services are as inclusive as they can be. We do this by:
We're currently listening to community voices in the following ways.
The Disabled Car Users Advisory Group is a group of organisational representatives, disabled individuals and Parking Service Managers exploring and resolving issues faced by disabled people and their families and carers in accessing Brighton & Hove by car.
The purpose of the Disabled Car Users Advisory Group is to improve communication and dialogue between the Parking service and disabled residents.
Bringing together stakeholders with an interest in healthier, low-carbon and accessible modes of transport.
The Active and Inclusive Travel Forum includes disability representation and focuses on identifying user experiences that can:
Accessible cycle parking and storage for adapted cycles, wider cycle lanes, footways clear of obstructions, inclusive signage, drop kerbs, and audible and tactile indicators at crossings, are all areas of focus that are important for disabled people.
Representatives from the Beach Access Team Brighton & Hove (BAT) and the Seafront team.
The group aims to improve beach access and provide safe and independent access over the shingle beaches and down to the shoreline for people who use mobility aids.
During recent years, BAT has collated a significant evidence base from those living with, or whose lives are impacted by, disability and additional needs to inform the focus of the working group.
Enabling disabled representatives to provide guidance to the City Parks team on key project work including:
Environmental Services (formerly known as CityClean) is also looking to establish a similar arrangement to inform the work of the rest of the City Environment.
While we have established mechanisms for garnering voices from our disabled community, we recognise these need to be further developed to provide richer dialogue as one part of the wider engagement activity we need to build on.
We know that we need to improve not only community insight but also our qualitative and quantitative data which will further help shape service delivery and decisions.
The Families, Children and Wellbeing (FCW) Directorate brings together different services for children and young people as well as services for adults with learning disabilities (LD) and support for skills and employment.
We're committed to working as one Directorate to deliver safe and whole family services, with a focus on improving outcomes and delivering inclusive, accessible, and intersectional provision.
The voice of children, young people, their families, and those of adults with learning disabilities is at the heart of everything we do.
Our staff are our greatest resource, and we're committed to supporting them and their professional development.
To achieve this, we:
There are 4 key branches in the directorate including:
Our Public Health team works with residents and organisations in Brighton & Hove to promote health and wellbeing. They produce the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) and provide public health advice to the NHS and its partners.
As part of the Youth Service Grant Programme 2021 to 2025 an annual grant is provided to 3 equality groups for youth provision, including young people with SEND, particularly targeting autistic young people with complex needs.
All commissioned youth providers are required to have equality, diversity and inclusion embedded in their activities, governance, and management arrangements with plans on how they will promote inclusion within their service, with progress on this being reported on regularly.
Area youth providers are working in partnership with specialist agencies to provide specific youth groups for autistic young people with less complex needs and support in mainstream youth groups/programmes.
As part of our ongoing work, we have identified some key areas of focus to better support families in need.
These include our:
These co-produced initiatives help us better understand the residents we're most wanting to support and consider where our resources most need to be directed.
Our action plan for the Accessible City Strategy complements and further supports this work.
The directorate provides a range of different services from universal to those targeted at small groups of people with very high levels of need and/or where we are required to fulfil a statutory duty.
Some of the key groups of users we interact with are as follows (these figures are a mixture of snapshots in time or usage over a set period and are shared with the intention of being illustrative):
We have a directorate-wide commitment to community voice. We work hard to ensure this is embedded across our service including:
Libraries have long promoted the importance of digital inclusion, supporting the Digital Brighton & Hove project.
Despite many services moving online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people in Brighton & Hove remain digitally excluded. It's estimated that just over 7% of the local population do not use the internet and just over half the population do not have the essential digital skills for life.
As technology develops, bringing with it greater opportunities to improve health and wellbeing, be that domestic apps or telecare and telehealth, it's essential that any plan on accessibility incorporates and prioritises technological and digital solutions.
Key data:
Community Cohesion includes the Community Safety team and Third Sector grant programmes. We lead on delivering the Council Plan mission to create a city where everyone feels safe, included, and welcome. 
Key data:
Legal services offer expert advice to all staff and councillors across Brighton & Hove City Council on a full range of council responsibilities and public sector duties.
Democratic Services ensure the smooth and efficient running of the decision-making processes of Brighton & Hove City Council. They support staff and councillors in developing, coordinating and overseeing the implementation of effective policies, strategies, and partnerships. 
They ensure Brighton & Hove City Council: 
Finance ensures that Brighton & Hove City Council uses public money only for approved purposes and in accordance with regulations.
We also provide advice and support to councillors and staff to manage finances effectively and achieve good value for money within the financial controls.
Brighton & Hove City Council’s property and land portfolio includes assets such as:
The service leads Brighton & Hove City Council’s property strategy and delivers corporate and commercial property maintenance services with an emphasis on an investment approach that delivers new revenue streams from Brighton & Hove City Council’s assets while keeping them safe and fit for purpose. 
A key driver is contributing to housing delivery, the carbon-neutral agenda and community wealth. 
The service is responsible for the delivery of the 100-year City Downland Estate Plan, which is essential for promoting natural capital investment, supporting biodiversity, and tackling climate change.
People and Innovation supports council services to ensure that staff work as one council to better serve our customers, councillors, and staff, as well as optimising resources and ensuring robust governance.
Innovation provide project management support to plan, deliver and drive change to improve services to our residents and customers.
They support the delivery of programmes and projects to modernise Brighton & Hove City Council, helping officers and councillors to continuously improve Brighton & Hove City Council’s performance and manage risk.
The service provides advice and regulation around collecting and processing information such as Freedom of Information Requests and Subject Access Requests.
Human Resources, Health, Safety, Wellbeing and Building Services and Learning, Inclusion and Organisational Development (HR & OD) support the management of Brighton & Hove City Council employees, including health, safety, wellbeing, learning and development.
Strategic Communications and Engagement connects Brighton & Hove City Council and its services with Brighton & Hove, communicating news and information to improve our engagement.
They have led engagement workshops to develop the Accessible City and Anti-Racism Strategies. 
Likewise, as a landlord, the housing service has developed consultative structures to better engage with residents, with focus groups being held within minoritised communities to widen representation and engagement. 
Following the return to face-to-face meetings after the pandemic, the Tenant Disability Network has gathered momentum, with a City-Wide Conference held in 2022 to relaunch the network and to promote the themes of accessibility and engagement. 
As part of our Fair and Inclusive Action Plan (FIAP), we have been working proactively to understand, engage with, and respond effectively to our city’s diverse population.
Additionally, services across People and Innovation have delivered mandatory customer experience training for new council employees which includes equalities to meet users’ needs and requirements, as well as encouraging all staff to complete equalities monitoring forms to increase the percentage of known data.
As a council, we value diversity and the unique individuality of our workforce. Our aim is to create the best possible working environment that enables and supports each team member’s skills, talents, abilities, and experience to contribute in a meaningful and impactful way.
We're committed to reducing inequity in employment and aspire to achieve a more diverse workforce that reflects the economically active population within our city and develop a disability-inclusive and anti-racist workplace culture in which everyone can thrive and reach their full potential.
We recognise the areas of work we need to maintain focus on to address disproportionate outcomes. We have a Disability Confident scheme on our jobs pages, which offers an interview to disabled applicants who meet the minimum essential criteria for the job.
We annually review our council-wide Learning and Development offer, including offering training courses in:
Brighton & Hove City Council also re-launched its internal website providing a wide range of information and resources to staff in a more accessible way.
As part of its Public Sector Equality Duty, Brighton & Hove City Council carries out regular equalities monitoring and publishes its statutory annual workforce equalities report on the council website.
However, we're aware of the challenges when it comes to collecting data on equality from our customers and residents.
We'll continue to work together with partners and communities to better explain why this data is important and helpful in improving services, and how we'll store and use the data.
We have refreshed Brighton & Hove City Council’s Community Engagement Framework.
We have undertaken a detailed engagement and consultation programme with:
This research identified several key themes we have used to better understand what the strategy needs to deliver through our strategic-themed areas of work. This gives structure to how we will deliver and create an accessible city (through our focused actions by every directorate) through this strategy as part of our core equality work.
The following themes were felt to be critical by disabled people to be able to live, work, study and visit Brighton & Hove in the most barrier-free way:
Addressing these themes is key to the selection of our strategic themed areas of work, action planning approach, action selection and prioritisation over 5 years of this strategy and our ongoing work.
To ensure external accountability and oversight, we've established 2 key methods for ongoing community engagement and consultation through the setting up of the Disability Panel and the Wider Reference Group.
The Accessible City Strategy and the Anti-Racism Strategy are 5-year strategies to realistically reflect the time it will take to achieve change.
They intentionally speak to each other with actions that affect each other and are intersectional.
The action plans will sit across the 5 years and be reviewed and updated annually. The actions do not need to be performative or identified for immediate delivery.
Within all the work that may need to happen, our goal and encouragement is to identify key, critical actions only and keep them meaningful specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART), mitigating stress, pressure, and additional reporting.
This work is meant to enable long-term relief from what creates pressure and challenges for us and our residents today. Duplication, siloed thinking and excessive actions will be discouraged. Cross-thinking and transparent sharing of ideas across directorates will be encouraged and facilitated by the Equality Diversity and Inclusion team.
Two hour-long action planning workshops have been conducted with key directorate leads throughout November 2022, facilitated by the Equality Diversity and Inclusion team and focusing on the directorate’s equality challenges and pressures.
During the sessions, the directorates have identified and prioritised their critical actions under relevant strategic themes.
Directorates have proactively shared examples and discussed identifying their prioritised actions, sharing action plans in a collective online shared space to support the development of cohesive council-wide working and exposure and appreciation of each other’s collective and individual directorate service barriers and solutions.
Accessibility-centred and intersectional actions, reviewing against those of their anti-racism strategy, have been revised and re-prioritised as part of the overall delivery of actions to create equity and inclusion through the Fair and Inclusive Action Plan (FIAP).
Directorates are not expected to have actions under all 3 themes. The themes are interlinked in their impact, so an action in one will influence change in another.
The goal of action planning has been to assist directorates and services in identifying their top critical actions, from one to a maximum of 3 and to support and encourage them to think in a nuanced and intersectional way, without over-committing or feeling overwhelmed by the commitment.
We do not need or want to capture everything, instead, we focus on what will have the maximum impact on reducing exclusionary outcomes for residents, customers, service users and communities.
A Task and Finish Group was created, comprising a representative from each of the Brighton & Hove City Council’s 5 directorates, Council Equalities Officers and the Chief Executive of the local charity Possability People.
The group’s role was to ensure the successful development and approval of the Brighton & Hove City Council’s Accessible City Strategy within the project’s deadlines.
All key feedback from consultation with internal and external stakeholders has informed our approach to creating cohesive working and has addressed siloed outcomes and one-off solutions that will not benefit the creation of an accessible city.
Disability and long-term health conditions have an impact on many people. The inequalities disabled people experience in everyday life can be significant.
This section puts into context the lived experience of disabled people in the UK and relates to the types of services we provide and influence at Brighton & Hove City Council.
Research shows that the number of people with disabilities is increasing. This is partly due to an ageing population, together with advances in medical interventions. However, people with disabilities are often the forgotten ‘minority’ even though they form a significant part of the population.
The World Report on Disability (2011) indicates that inequalities disabled people live with include:
Many of these factors are mirrored within the UK.
There are 14.6 million people in the UK living with a disability or long-term health condition which equates to 22% of the population and this is reflected in the South-East (ONS report Outcomes for Disabled People 2021).
The prevalence of disability rises with age. From 2020 to 2021 around 9% of children in the UK were disabled, compared to 21% of working-age adults and 42% of adults over State Pension age.
Most people aged 80 and over reported a disability (59%).
Disability is a characteristic which impacts all other identities a disabled person also has and various protected characteristic groups, having additional complex inter-connected impacts and barriers disabled people face due to such intersectionality. For example, in the Annual Population Survey (2021), based on self-reporting, an estimated 10% of disabled people are from a minoritised ethnic background.
This breaks down into:
This compares to the minoritised ethnic population equating to 12% of the total population.
According to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, older women face greater discrimination, bias, and marginalisation.
The United Nations (U.N.) Bill of Rights of Women found that this was further compounded for older women who also had a disability. They found this group was overlooked and underrepresented in the development of policies, programmes, initiatives, and legislation. Addressing this was seen as an integral part of the 2023 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a key principle of which is ‘Leave No One Behind’.
The U.N. Human Rights Council's report of the Independent Expert on Protection against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, looked specifically at gender-based violence and found that gender non-conforming people with a disability were significantly more likely to experience this.
The School for Social Work Research highlighted the challenges that LGBTQI+ disabled people experienced. The barriers they identified included:
The research identified the importance of social care assessments emphasising the whole person and not ignoring sexual orientation or gender identity.
The interrogation of disability and ethnicity, culture, expatriates, migrants, and Black and Racially Minoritised identities (among others) remain under-explored, both in terms of qualitative lived experiences, impact, and nature of any type of systemic barriers and within quantitative research.
Research widely remains influenced by the perspectives of researchers and those researched belonging predominantly to White, Western-Euro-centric, Christian, and heteronormative identities.
There's limited data available in some areas at the time of publishing the strategy. There are however disproportionate impacts due to disabilities across various intersecting identities, whether disabilities have a day-to-day impact or not compared to those who are not disabled at this time.
Data on disability in Brighton & Hove shows:
The COVID data for example is only available nationally, indicating that the risk of death involving COVID-19 was 1.4 times greater for more-disabled men and 1.3 times greater for less-disabled men, compared with non-disabled men (source: The Office for National Statistics on Updated estimates of coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by disability status, England).
The lived experiences of many disabled people demonstrate the everyday challenges they face.
We've identified areas that Brighton & Hove City Council can have a direct, positive impact on through this Accessible City Strategy.
Scope conducted research in February 2022 which identified the disproportionate impact of the cost-of-living crisis on disabled people. The research found that disabled people were both:
A YouGov survey in June 2022 found that 29% of households where someone with a disability lived were in serious financial difficulty, compared with 13% of other households.
The National Health Service (NHS) has begun trialling ‘heating prescriptions’ to ensure disabled people have electricity for things such as ventilators, wheelchairs and feeding tube pumps.
The House of Commons Research Briefing on Disability paper of 2022 shows that the proportion of disabled people with no qualifications was nearly 3 times that of non-disabled people.
In addition, 13.3% of disabled people had no qualifications, almost 3 times the proportion of non-disabled people (4.6%).
25% of disabled people held a degree or equivalent compared to 43% of non-disabled people.
Across all age groups (21 to 64 years), disabled people were less likely to have obtained a degree and more likely to have no qualifications than non-disabled people.
The largest disparity between disabled and non-disabled people achieving a degree was seen for the youngest age group (21 to 24 years), with 17.8% of disabled people obtaining a degree compared with 42.5% of non-disabled people.
The Labour Force Survey (2020) showed that 9 million people of working age reported a disability. This can be further analysed as:
The Labour Force Survey (2020) also identified a disability pay gap in 2021 of 13.8%. This means that disabled people are on average paid just less than £2 per hour compared to non-disabled people.
Working disabled people were less likely to work as managers, directors and senior officials in professional occupations than working non-disabled people.
More disabled people were self-employed (13.8%) than non-disabled people (12.5%).
NHS Digital research published in 2022 found that the proportion of adults with a learning disability in paid employment was 4.8%.
The House of Commons Research Briefing on Disability (2022) shows that poverty rates are identified to be higher amongst families where at least one member is disabled.
27% of families with at least one disabled member live in relative poverty, compared to 19% of families without a disabled family member.
Food poverty affects 18.4% of disabled people aged 16 to 64, compared with 7.5% of non-disabled people.
The most recent data from the research briefing shows that households with a disabled family member had a median weekly income of £406 after housing costs (in 2019 to 2020 prices). This is £94 less than households with no disabled members (£500).
The Disability Price Tag Report (2019) commissioned by Scope identified that on average, a disabled person faces extra costs of £583 a month. These extra costs are equivalent to almost half of their income (not including housing costs).
Disabled people’s money does not tend to go as far. On average, £100 for a non-disabled person is equivalent to £68 for a disabled person.
Families with disabled children on average face extra costs of £581 a month. For almost a quarter (24%) of families with disabled children, these extra costs amount to over £1,000 a month.
Obtaining adequate healthcare is a challenge for many disabled people. According to a recent report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, some disabled people reported do-not-resuscitate orders being put on their files without their knowledge or consent.
Poor quality healthcare causes health inequalities and avoidable deaths.
The 2018 Learning Disabilities Mortality Review (LeDeR) found the median age at death was 60 for men and 59 for women with a learning disability, for those (aged 4 and over) who died from April 2017 to December 2018. This is significantly less than the median age of death of 83 for men and 86 for women in the general population. This means the difference in median age of death between people with a learning disability (aged 4 and over) and the general population is 23 years for men and 27 years for women.
The Confidential Inquiry into premature deaths of people with a learning disability found that 38% of people with a learning disability died from an avoidable cause, compared to 9% of people without a learning disability.
The Annual Population Survey (2021) uses 4 measures of personal well-being:
Respondents are asked to rate each on a scale from 0 to 10.
Disabled people rated their happiness levels as 6.4 compared to non-disabled people of 7.6. Disabled people rated their anxiety levels as 4.6, compared to non-disabled people of 3.
Specifically in relation to the COVID response, disabled people reported lower levels of well-being throughout every stage of the pandemic response.
The proportion of disabled people (15.1%) aged 16 years and over in England who reported feeling lonely “often or always” was over 4 times that of non-disabled people (3.6%).
The two largest disparities between the housing situations of disabled and non-disabled people are between levels of homeownership and social renting.
In the year to June 2021, just over half (53.3%) of non-disabled people owned their own home, compared to 39.7% of disabled people. Whereas a quarter (24.9%) of disabled people rented social housing, compared to 7.9% of non-disabled people.
Disabled people were significantly less likely to own their own home than non-disabled people across all ages (excluding ages 16 to 24 years). The largest disparity was seen for ages 45 to 49 years, where 46.4% of disabled people owned their own homes compared with 72.8% of non-disabled people.
From 2020 to 2021, over half (54.6%) of households in the social rented sector included at least one person with a limiting long-term illness or disability.
Disabled people were more likely to live with parents than their non-disabled counterparts (19.2% compared to 16.4%), while non-disabled people were slightly more likely to rent privately (17.4% compared to 16.9%).
One in 5 households including someone with a limiting long-term illness or disability whose condition made it necessary to have adaptations in their home considered their accommodation to be unsuitable from 2019 to 2020.
In 2020, disabled adults aged 16 and over in England made 28% fewer trips than non-disabled adults – 581 trips on average per year, compared to 803 trips respectively.
A report produced by Scope in 2017 found that 47% of disabled people faced some form of discrimination while travelling on public transport. 15% said they faced “high-level” abuse.
The Scope report highlighted:
Disabled people aged 16 years and over were as likely to have been involved in civic participation (45.7%), such as signing a petition or attending a public rally, as non-disabled people (43.0%).
Similar proportions of disabled and non-disabled people were involved in civic consultations, civic activism, and social action in 2021.
Disabled people showed similar proportions of participation in either formal or informal volunteering (30.4% for formal and 56.6% for informal) to non-disabled people (32.9% and 55.6% respectively).
According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2020, in England and Wales disabled people aged 16 years and over (43.4%) were significantly more likely to have experienced anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the year ending March 2020 than non-disabled people (39%).
In a report commissioned by Leonard Cheshire and United Response in 2022, it was found that incidents of hate crimes against disabled people have doubled in the last 4 years with more than half of incidents involving an element of violence.
According to research, only 1% of reported crimes resulted in charges being brought. The report also found that there's significant underreporting of incidents.
Disabled people were more likely to report finding access to products in person difficult compared with non-disabled people (41.6% compared with 15.8%). This includes products such as groceries, medicine, and clothes.
Disabled people were more likely to report finding access to services in person difficult compared with non-disabled people (51.5% compared with 25.2%). This includes services such as banks and building societies, restaurants and bars, hairdressers, sports and exercise facilities, and cinemas.
Among disabled people, those aged 75 years and over reported the most difficulties accessing products (53.9%) compared with all other age groups. This ranged between 34.7% for those aged 25 to 44 years and 42.5% for those aged 45 to 64 years.
Disabled people of all ages reported more difficulties accessing services than non-disabled people. This disparity was greatest for those aged 75 years and over (58.8% of disabled people and 22.1% of non-disabled people aged 75 years and over).
Disabled people were most likely to report having difficulty accessing “medicine, for example, prescriptions or over-the-counter medications” and “banks or building societies” in comparison with non-disabled people (with a 15.0 and 10.7 percentage point difference respectively).
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was the most common barrier reported by both disabled (85.6%) and non-disabled (90.7%) people who had difficulty accessing products or services.
To learn more about disability under the law, you can:
To learn more about systemic change, intersectionality and leading with vulnerability, you can:
To learn more about migratisation and migrant-related work and terminology, you can visit the Migrants' Rights Network webpage.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on educational outcomes for disabled people in the UK aged 21 to 64 years, with analysis by age, sex, impairment type, impairment severity, country and region using Annual Population Survey (APS) data.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on employment outcomes for disabled people in the UK aged 16 to 64 years, with analysis by age, sex, impairment type, country, region, type of occupation and working patterns using Annual Population Survey (APS) data.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on social participation outcomes for disabled people in England aged 16 years and over, with analysis of participation in civic engagements, social action, volunteering, and groups, clubs or organisations by age, sex, impairment severity and region using the Community Life Survey (CLS) data.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on housing outcomes for disabled people in the UK aged 16 to 64 years, with analysis by age, sex, impairment type, country and region using Annual Population Survey (APS) data.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on average well-being for disabled people in the UK aged 16 to 64 years, with analysis by age, sex, impairment type, impairment severity, country and region using Annual Population Survey (APS) data.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on loneliness outcomes for disabled people in England aged 16 years and over, with analysis by age, sex, impairment severity and region using the Community Life Survey (CLS) data.
Released 10 February 2022.
Gives data on the experience of anti-social behaviour (ASB) outcomes for disabled people in England and Wales aged 16 to 59 years, with analysis by age, sex, impairment type, impairment severity, country and region using the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data.
Read the Office of National Statistics (ONS) report Outcomes for Disabled People (2021).
Indicators from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) on disabled people's experiences of accessing products and services in person in Great Britain.
This release uses 3 waves of survey results covering dates between 16 February and 27 March 2022
Read the findings of research conducted by Mencap into health inequalities (2018).
Read Scope's report on discrimination of disabled people on public transport systems (2019).
Read the World Health Organisation's World Report on Disability (2011).
Read findings from the Labour Force Survey (2020).
Read the House of Commons' Research Briefing on Disability (2022).
The Accessible City Strategy is available in various accessible formats, including
To request the Accessible City Strategy in another format or if you have any questions about the Accessible City Strategy:
Braille production will require a 3-week turnaround time from our suppliers and will be posted.
BSL and Easy Read versions will be available online. Easy Read versions can be printed and posted within 2 weeks of contacting the team.
