“On the four-hour journey to Edinburgh I could be in the office”

Phil Friend, 63, is a hugely influential figure in the voluntary sector, fighting for the rights of wheelchair users and for people with a range of disabilities for over 20 years. Starting his working life as a social worker in an institution for young offenders, he launched himself into a new career in the 1980s as one of the UK’s first major disability consultants. He founded the pioneering disability consultancy Minty & Friend, which helps disabled people and their employers work more effectively together through training and adjusting working practices, and today chairs the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation (RADAR).

Friend is also the enthusiastic holder of a Disabled Persons Railcard, and says he has seen significant improvements in disabled access to rail travel in his lifetime. The biggest worry in the past was whether a train would have an accessible toilet, but these are normally no longer a problem on intercity routes. He usually travels alone, regularly booking assistance to move onto the train when he sets off, and alight at his destination.

Friend’s favourite rail journey is the day train from London to Edinburgh. “Partly due to the sheer scenery after Newcastle, and also you can do an enormous amount of work on a train,” he says.

Friend travels by rail for business purposes about once a month, normally in a first-class seat, so he can get on with his work in peace, and because there is a trolley service bringing round food and drink, which suits him better as he can’t get to the dining car in his wheelchair. An added bonus in recent times has been the introduction of Wi-Fi (wireless internet technology) on many trains. “So on the four-hour journey to Edinburgh I could be in the office,” he says.

As a Motability car owner and wheelchair user, Friend says he sometimes finds it more convenient to drive shorter distances, and prefers to avoid the crush in rush-hour services.

Some disabled people may not qualify for state benefits or see themselves as disabled, so they might not be taking advantage of travelling by rail and getting a third off their fare with a Disabled Persons Railcard. “There are many people who don’t qualify for Disability Living Allowance or who aren’t in the Motability scheme – so I suspect there is a lot of traffic out there that the railways could have,” Friend says.

So how could the railways get more of those people onto trains? “Predictability and reliability,” Friend suggests.

He identifies two key points. Firstly, administrative processes, i.e. booking assistance over the phone, which is “never the same twice,” he says. Secondly, there is a worry about assistance actually being provided at the station where a person’s journey begins, and at their destination. “At the station there’s that lovely moment when you’re wondering whether the station staff have heard of you. Occasionally they scratch their heads! The next big moment is at the station where you arrive. I tend to talk to the ticket inspector on the train and ask them to phone ahead.”

“I am very confident human being. I’m rarely nervous – I’m a bit gung-ho. But [before a train journey] I get little nervy moments, mainly connected to the assistance issue,” he says.

He does stress that when things go wrong, they are still better than in the past. For example, if assistance is not provided when a wheelchair user needs to alight at the end of his or her journey, staff on the train now have an emergency ramp they can use to get a wheelchair user off a train if assistance goes wrong. Sometimes it might not occur to rail staff that someone in a wheelchair might also be a business person working to tight schedules, so service can be slow. “Some of us are incredibly busy people,” he says.

Friend not only runs his own business but is also chair of RADAR, which describes itself as a national network of disability organisations and disabled people. What does he see as RADAR’s main achievements over the last five years?

Firstly, RADAR has greatly improved its Board of Trustees in recent years, which means the organisation is run in a more businesslike fashion – “the days of well-meaning amateurs on the board are over.” Secondly, RADAR is financially independent – because Enham, the disability organisation that RADAR was previously linked to, wrote off some of RADAR’s debts, and also due to cuts and a new staffing model. RADAR now has a core of professional staff and a small army of staff on short-term contracts who are employed for specific projects and leave when the projects finish. Friend sells this as a way of keeping the organisation solvent and also giving opportunities to a range of young, often disabled people.

Critics might argue that using younger people on short-term contracts with no job security is a way of running an organisation cheaply, and that people need secure jobs that they can support families and pay mortgages with rather than six-month contracts best suited to young people with few commitments. There is also the danger that charities end up exploiting people’s enthusiasm. Friend, however, doesn’t see it that way. “These are very fresh people with passion, with sheer enthusiasm and we have a nucleus of project leaders, permanent staff who bring in teams for specific projects. We are giving lots of experience to young people and lots of them are disabled.”

Friend also says RADAR has become clearer about its mission – which includes developing disabled people as leaders through its leadership programme, getting people with long-term conditions out of poverty and lobbying the government for changes designed to help disabled people to live independently, for example on the current reform of the benefits system.

With regard to public transport, Friend states that RADAR is currently focused more on buses and taxis rather than trains – though they do connect up. “The railways rely on people being able to get to and away from the station,” he says. “Transport for disabled people needs to be seen as a package.”

Many minicabs waiting at rural stations are saloon cars which cannot accommodate powered wheelchairs, for instance. RADAR is continuing to campaign for parliament to introduce regulations making it mandatory for all taxis to be accessible by 2010, and not by 2020 as the government has proposed. “Disabled people should not have to wait another 14 years for a taxi we can use!” RADAR says on its website.

But the 2020 deadline for accessible taxis is the same deadline as trains, which are built to last for over 30 years far longer than the average car. Given that taxi companies replace their vehicles far more frequently than rail companies replace their trains, does Friend not think that this might be a relatively easy issue for the taxi industry to give ground on (especially since the taxi industry offers disabled people the flexibility of door-to-door travel at any time of any day)?

“There is no question a taxi is far easier to replace than a train,” Friend agrees. But, as a regular taxi user, he adds that the business case for modernising taxis should be made more vociferously. Insufficient accessible taxis at local stations in rural areas are a bigger issue, in his view, and Friend wants local authorities to make it compulsory for a proportion of these to be made accessible. Currently, local authorities that license taxis must take account of the percentage of disabled people that form part of their local population in order for them to decide how many accessible vehicles they will need, and some local authorities are better at this than others. Recent changes in legislation, particularly the Disability Equality Duty (DED), which came into force in December 2006 and is meant to ensure that all public bodies promote equality of opportunity for disabled people, may also provide ways in which disabled people can challenge what their local authority is doing about the numbers of licensed accessible vehicles that are available to them.

And while London buses set the standard, with ramps for wheelchairs, electronic bulletin boards showing bus information, and brightly coloured grab rails, for example, in some rural areas buses can be less accessible, making rail travel - which so often includes a bus connection to get to or from a railway station - more difficult.

RADAR is perhaps most famous for the ‘RADAR Key’ – the key to around 8,000 toilets across the country (visit RADAR's website for more information). Many Disabled Persons Railcard holders will be familiar with the RADAR locks, if not the keys, as they can be found on the doors to accessible toilets at rail stations up and down the country.

The scheme goes well beyond the rail industry and through the National Key Scheme, RADAR provides keys to thousands of disabled toilets throughout the UK, which are sometimes locked to prevent vandalism. This way disabled people may easily use toilets without having to spend time and energy to get them unlocked.

Critics of the scheme say that the RADAR scheme suits the needs of businesses better than customers, as it is designed to reduce use of accessible toilets which then reduces the need for businesses to build them. And not every disabled person has a RADAR key, while the scheme also excludes other user groups who might need more space (such as parents with buggies). Would the needs of disabled people be better served by RADAR discontinuing the key scheme and pressing service providers to make accessible toilets standard provision for all people?

“A key objective of the scheme is independence,” stresses Friend – “many disabled people will not travel if they don’t know whether they can go to the toilet.” He points out that anyone can apply for a key, and that separate accessible toilets are needed because men and women cannot use each other’s toilet areas, so a female carer could not accompany a male wheelchair user into a cubicle within the male toilet block in order to assist him. Aside from the cost and in some cases the practicalities of making all toilets accessible there are these additional privacy issues.

Friend says he is keeping a ‘watching brief’ on London mayor Boris Johnson’s policy on disability issues. He says that RADAR will not oppose the phased withdrawal of ‘bendy’ buses as announced in August 2008 if Johnson can bring in a new Routemaster that is as accessible as a bendy bus – which appears unlikely as the bendy buses are generally agreed to be better for disabled people and parents with buggies. When it comes to previous mayor Ken Livingstone, Friend says what he achieved for disabled people was to embed the issue – so disability is part of policy now and not just an add-on.

He is also keeping a watching brief on the new welfare reforms given the added pressure on government budgets due to the financial crisis. “It was always going to be tough getting one million people off Incapacity Benefit [as the government would like to do] and now it will be tougher,” he says.

There are some encouraging signs, such as the increased budget for Access to Work, a government scheme which pays for equipment and support workers that disabled people need to work effectively, he says. And Friend approves of the rationale underlying the new benefit system that is now replacing Incapacity Benefits – the idea that the state should look at what disabled people can do, rather than what they can’t.

RADAR itself is campaigning to radically improve the social care system by enabling disabled people to control their own budgets for social care and to exercise real choice over where to live. “It’s the disabled person as the central focus – the expert client/patient,” he says, though he acknowledges that there will also be some disabled people who are not able to manage their own budgets without a great deal of support.

This ties in with Friend’s firm belief that for disabled people to be independent, they need to be financially independent. Work is key. “People achieve status, friendships and money through working … So many disabled people are marginalised, [though] it’s not necessarily deliberate but more based on ignorance and in part, it can also be due to people having their own self-limiting beliefs,” he says.

And while government action is a significant part of the solution, business also has a role to play; some industries are still not employing many disabled people. Friend picks out several leaders in the field: Lloyds TSB (which Minty & Friend has advised), which asks its disabled staff on a regular basis what improvements they think it could make; Motability, the charity which runs the Motability scheme under which disabled people can use their government-funded mobility allowances to obtain a new car, powered wheelchair or scooter; B&Q; Marks & Spencer; and BT (also a Minty & Friend client). It is, unsurprisingly, the bigger companies which have the resources to become better employers for disabled people, as they are generally for women.

Closer to home, major national charities have in the past come under fire for employing a low percentage of disabled people. RADAR does well here: the chair [Friend] and chief executive Liz Sayce are disabled, as are more than 50% of employees and 75% of the Board of Trustees – surely a lesson for others in the sector. It’s not always simple, however – there are ongoing difficult areas, Friend admits, such as women with very young children and people with fluctuating conditions.

Over the last eight years, Friend has run programmes for disabled staff at a major bank designed to help them handle their impairment and other people more effectively. People need to take control of their disability in order to gain a greater degree of control over their lives and get further in the workplace, he argues.

Friend is a living example of this theory. He contracted polio at the age of three, was on crutches until his twenties before starting to use a wheelchair, and at the same time trained as a social worker. He ran a large institution for young men who had committed serious offences, some of them violent, and managed a team of 60 staff, 40 young men, and an annual budget of three quarter of a million pounds.

When government policy changed in the 1980s and the institution closed down on the grounds that it cost too much to run, Friend started meeting and talking to other disabled people and became angry about disability issues in the same way that he had been moved by the poor treatment and experiences of the young offenders he had worked with.

“My wife came up with the idea that I had to be expert at something. She said to me that I was an expert at being a wheelchair user. This was in the early 1980s when there were about two people in the UK working as disability consultants, and charging for their advice. So I had a go,” he says.

This gave him management experience he later used to set up Minty & Friend and chair RADAR. “I made lots of mistakes,” he admits. But he did a lot more than ‘have a go,’ building up a highly successful consultancy, Minty & Friend, which advises leading UK companies on how better to manage disability and diversity.

What kind of mistakes has Friend made?

“Because I’m not a details person, I get bored easily, a bit like Toad of Toad Hall. So if the people who have worked for me were to be critical they could say I am a bit of a butterfly. Simon Minty, my business partner at Minty & Friend, is much better at this than me! I’m an entrepreneur. I want to be with people.” Retrospectively, Friend says he might have developed more of a framework for his business, including issues like appraisals, though he is more a relationships person than a business person – although he did successfully found Minty & Friend, and must know his way round a budget sheet as chair of RADAR.

He is also aware that his own temperament has sometimes caused problems. “The other thing is volatility – I can get very angry about injustice and don’t want to be in the same room as someone who is not interested in the issue and is playing games. I won’t tolerate it. I can spot them a mile off. I am not going to compromise on some things and that has sometimes got me into a mess. But the ability to shoot my mouth off has been appropriate 80% of the time,” he says. And it’s striking how secure Friend is, how relaxed he is discussing his own faults, although one gets the feeling that he won’t reveal all, that though he is charming and seems open, this is partly the charm of someone practised at dealing with the press, someone who is pretty sure he can win if there is a conflict within a conversation.

In future, Friend says he plans to get back to basics, by returning to campaigning. “It’s time to wind down what I do commercially and wind up my campaigning activities.” He wants to work within the government and organisations rather than outside, and believes in the power of argument. “You will not get what you want unless you convince others that it is in their best interest,” he says. The job of charities like RADAR is, in his view, to ensure that people who find it difficult to articulate what they need are heard. Charities need to make sure they know what those needs are.

How does RADAR ensure that it represents the perspective of the disabled people it represents? “I think representing is a dangerous issue – we listen and report,” Friend says. “What RADAR has to do really well is to organise opportunities for members to share their thoughts with us and feed that into the system We report, not represent; we try to give an accurate picture to the people we are talking to [for example in government] about what disabled people tell us.”

Where it is impossible to persuade an organisation of the business case for change, legal action can be the best way forward: “The business community takes notice of high-profile litigation.”

RADAR also has a charter from the monarch to perform its role. Given this, and its high-level role, how does it guard against becoming too close to the establishment?

“We talk with figures from the Establishment - of course we do, because we want to bring about change, but we do not have any connections to it and we never think about the Royal Family when we are doing our work,” says Friend. He points out that RADAR was one of the key charities behind the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) coming into force in 1995.