If you’re disabled, you’ll already know that proving it never seems to end. Every application comes with another request for evidence, another assessment, another consultant’s letter and another opportunity to explain, in painstaking detail, why the lifelong condition you’ve already proved several times hasn’t mysteriously disappeared since the last person asked. Whether it’s Adult Disability Payment, Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Universal Credit, housing support, a Blue Badge or countless other services, disabled people become experts in compiling medical evidence because, apparently, existing while disabled isn’t quite enough. You need a filing cabinet to go with it.
Against that backdrop, I decided to update my Access Card. This wasn’t my first application. I already had an Access Card. I simply needed to update my name and make one small change to the information displayed on it. A perfectly ordinary administrative request, or so I naively believed. As it turned out, asking for a simple amendment was treated with all the urgency and suspicion of someone trying to infiltrate MI5, rather than someone who just wanted to update an accessibility card.
Rather than updating my existing card, I was informed that I would need to start the entire application process from scratch. Evidently, somewhere between changing my name,making one change and pressing “submit”, my disability had become sufficiently uncertain that it required a complete reassessment. It seems the word ‘amendment’ has a very different meaning in the Nimbus dictionary.
The Access Card scheme is operated by Nimbus Disability, a private social enterprise. It isn’t a government department, it isn’t a local authority and it isn’t a statutory public body. It has no statutory powers to compel me, or anyone else, to provide information. Nevertheless, my experience left me with the distinct impression that this private organisation required more evidence than organisations with actual legal responsibility for assessing disability.
Fortunately, I keep a comprehensive folder containing my medical evidence. Years of consultant reports, specialist letters, assessments and supporting documentation sit neatly organised because, as any disabled person will tell you, experience teaches you never to throw anything away. The same folder has already been accepted for Adult Disability Payment, housing-related matters and other disability services. In other words, it has successfully demonstrated my disabilities to organisations whose decisions carry legal consequences and involve public money. I therefore made the apparently reckless assumption that it might also satisfy the requirements of a company issuing an accessibility card.
It didn’t.
Instead, I received an email informing me that one of the healthcare professionals who had written one of my documents would now need to send it directly to the Access Card Team from their NHS or workplace email address before my application could proceed. It seems that consultant letters are perfectly credible when they’re assessing entitlement to disability benefits, but become strangely suspicious the moment they’re attached to an email by the person they’re actually about. Clearly the missing ingredient all along wasn’t years of medical evidence but a second email confirming that the first email contained a document that had already been written by the same professional in the first place.
I can only assume that NHS staff have been crying out for additional administrative tasks to brighten their day. Between overflowing clinics, waiting lists and treating patients, I’m sure they were wondering how they could possibly fill those awkward spare moments unless private organisations started asking them to verify paperwork they’d already authored.
Now, before anyone suggests otherwise, organisations absolutely have a legitimate interest in preventing fraud. Nobody sensible argues that evidence should never be checked. Verification has its place. The question is one of proportionality. When the same body of evidence has already been accepted elsewhere, and when the applicant already holds one of your cards, there comes a point where additional hurdles begin to look less like safeguarding and more like bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake.
Then there’s the small matter of the fee.
After submitting extensive medical evidence, after restarting an application that arguably never needed restarting, and after being asked to involve healthcare professionals to verify documents they had already written, applicants are expected to pay for the privilege. There’s something wonderfully ironic about an accessibility scheme creating additional obstacles and then sending you an invoice at the end of them. If someone had pitched that idea as satire, it might have been rejected for being a little too on the nose.
Nimbus Disability describes itself as a social enterprise run by disabled people, for disabled people. That mission statement is precisely why this experience was so disappointing. An organisation built around accessibility should surely understand better than most that disabled people already spend an extraordinary amount of their lives proving themselves. We prove ourselves to benefit agencies, housing providers, employers, universities, local authorities and healthcare services. We carry folders of evidence because we’ve learned, through necessity rather than choice, that someone will almost certainly ask for it again. An accessibility scheme ought to reduce that burden, not enthusiastically add another chapter to it.
For my part, I’ve decided that enough really is enough. I’ve already submitted the same comprehensive evidence that has been accepted elsewhere, and I won’t be asking healthcare professionals to spend their valuable time sending emails to a private company to authenticate documents they have already written. If the evidence I’ve already provided isn’t sufficient to make a decision, then Nimbus Disability is perfectly entitled to make whatever decision it considers appropriate on the basis of that evidence.
Accessibility is supposed to remove barriers, not reinvent them. Disabled people already spend enough of their lives proving they deserve to access the world around them. They shouldn’t have to pay for yet another opportunity to do it.
and to top it all ofas I have been writing this I just received this –
Credit where it’s due , ignoring every question I’d asked while simultaneously asking for money is quite an achievement. I still don’t know whether I’ve actually been approved for the wheelchair symbol I applied for, but I have been approved to pay £15. At least one decision was made with remarkable confidence.