--- title: "Why isn’t our public transport network accessible for all?" episode: 16 date: 2020-10-01 guest: "Andy Barrow" canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/16-why-isnt-our-public-transport-network-accessible-for-all audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-016/audio.mp3 --- # Why isn’t our public transport network accessible for all? Joanne Lockwood is joined by accessibility consultant Andy Barrow to explore why public transport still isn’t accessible for everyone, and what meaningful accessibility looks like in real-world travel. They discuss where physical infrastructure is difficult to retrofit, and why assisted travel often becomes the make-or-break factor. Andy shares how poor processes and inconsistent culture can leave disabled passengers having to negotiate for basic support, from priority seating and bus wheelchair spaces to ramps not being provided at stations. Together they unpack how these situations create anxiety, remove agency, and add hidden “time costs” to everyday life. The conversation moves from individual incidents to organisational responsibility: designing for equity rather than one-size-fits-all solutions, building plan B responses when things go wrong, and creating a culture where frontline staff feel empowered to solve problems without fear of blame. Andy also shares his personal story as a Paralympian and how sport shaped his confidence and commitment to independence. Along the way they touch on how language and assumptions shape inclusion, and why listening to lived experience is essential if organisations want to build services that work for a wide range of needs. ## Chapters - 00:00 — Public transport accessibility challenges for wheelchair users. - 09:39 — Overcoming personal challenges to help others travel. - 14:27 — Need help getting on train due to disabilities. - 20:34 — Recognise plan a, accept plan b's importance. - 24:57 — Embracing failure is essential for growth. - 28:16 — Building confidence, using harmony for good. NHS comparison. - 31:56 — Feedback vital for employees and managers interaction. - 39:09 — Adapting to cultural differences in travel experiences. - 46:35 — Alternate Paralympics and Olympics every four years. - 52:32 — Women play with half point disability advantage. - 56:26 — Paralympic model imperfect for wheelchair basketball classification. - 01:00:15 — Share your thoughts and connect with us. ## Key takeaways - The complexities of physical access and the required assistance for navigating public transportation systems. - The societal and cultural attitudes towards disability, and their effect on the use of designated accessible spaces. - Strategies for coping with the lack of empathy and understanding from fellow passengers and transport staff. - Steps towards removing societal barriers and incorporating accessibility into the initial planning stages of transport services. - The empowerment and independence gained through adaptive sports, such as wheelchair rugby, and their impact on social inclusion. - Challenges and considerations surrounding the inclusion of transgender and nonbinary athletes in sports. - The broader implications of the Paralympic Games for social mobility and the representation of people with disabilities. ## FAQs ### Why is public transport not fully accessible for wheelchair users? As Andy Barrow explains, there are physical barriers within the infrastructure of public transport networks that can make it challenging for wheelchair users. This includes issues like lack of ramps, non-adjustable ticket counters, and the requirement for assistance, which is not always readily available. ### What are the cultural attitudes towards disability and how do they impact public transport accessibility? Joanne Lockwood mentions that cultural attitudes towards people with disabilities vary greatly. In some cultures, disabilities are met with empathy and a willingness to assist, while in others, the disabled may face apathy or even hostility. These attitudes can influence the level of assistance and accommodation people with disabilities receive when utilising public transport. ### What difficulties do wheelchair users face when asking someone to vacate an accessible seat? Both Joanne and Andy discuss the discomfort and awkwardness that wheelchair users may experience when asking others to move from accessible seating. This is often exacerbated by a lack of awareness or disregard from those occupying the seats unnecessarily. ### How important is employee engagement and understanding when it comes to accommodating individuals with disabilities? Andy stresses the importance of prioritising employee engagement and understanding to accommodate diverse needs. Employees should be empowered to make decisions and should be educated on the ways they can provide effective and compassionate service to people with disabilities. ### How can society better empower and include people with disabilities? Joanne and Andy suggest that removing societal constructs and environmental barriers, such as curbs without ramps or inaccessible taps, would allow for greater inclusion and empowerment of people with disabilities. ### What's the significance of the classification system in wheelchair rugby? The classification system in wheelchair rugby takes into consideration the physical capabilities of players to create a balanced and inclusive environment. It is based on the diversity of disabilities, and not skill level, which allows for a coed sport where women can also participate alongside men. ## Transcript Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I will be interviewing a number of amazing people and simply having a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. That's S-E-E Change Happen do Co dot UK. You'll be able to catch up with all of the shows and back episodes on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 16 with the title why isn't our public transport network accessible for all? And I have the absolute honour and privilege to be joined by Andy Barrow. Andy and I are both members of the Professional Speaking association and have met virtually a number of times over the past few years. Andy describes himself as an accessibility consultant for Southeastern Railway. He uses its expertise in teams and from his previous career as an international athlete and his experience as a world traveller to improve the processes and culture around assisted travel. I asked Andy to describe his superpower and he said, getting groups of individuals to recognise each other's superpowers and to work together to maximise their combined powers. Sounds interesting. Hello, Andy. Welcome to the show. Hi, Joanne. Andy Barrow: Fantastic to be here. It's very hot out. So looking forward to getting out in the sun after we've chatted. Oh, yeah. It's Joanne Lockwood: a record breaking few days, middle of early August, isn't it? Well, yeah, early August. Still early August. Yeah, it's lovely. It's been a beautiful Andy Barrow: summer all round, especially with the COVID backdrop. The weather we've had has given us the opportunity to be out and about if we're responsible and enjoy that, I agree completely. So tell me, Joanne Lockwood: why don't you feel that our public transport network is accessible for all and what can we do? It's an interesting Andy Barrow: question. I think, firstly, I want to answer it by kind of splitting or at least caveatting sort of public transport. I think as a wheelchair user, as a person who's used a wheelchair for a long time now, well over 20 years, I've been very lucky to sort of travel all over the place and sort of understand the landscape a little bit. And there's certain aspects of the public transport system that are going to be very hard to make physically accessible. If you take something like the tube, for example, is a victorian invention, it's going to be almost impossible to drop lift shafts into the kind of. If you imagine the tunnels under London as a ball of wall, if you're going to thread that needle with lift shafts, that's going to be very difficult. So what we're having to look at is accessibility through assistance. So to answer your question through that prism at the moment, there's two reasons, and that is that the processes don't always give the staff trying to assist the passengers the best possible chance of giving each passenger the assistance they need. And the second part is the culture. And that's basically the crux of that is perhaps the organisations or the staff not fully understanding the importance of people being able to have these assistance measures in order to travel and navigate the world independently. Joanne Lockwood: Completely agree. I had an epiphany probably a couple of years ago, because when we got onto the trains, when we got on the underground, there's always accessible seats near the entrance just by the doors, isn't there? So they're either embroidered into the seat so you can tell it's accessible on the tube or the stickers. Certainly. My train company is southwestern and it's very easy to see which ones are the assistance chairs. And it always frustrates me to see people just sitting in those by default, because it's the easiest chair. Okay, I'm not for 1 minute saying I'm judging people because they may have a hidden disability. There may be a valid reason for sitting there, but we know often the person sitting there probably could sit somewhere else if they wished. They have options, and that puts the burden of responsibility onto someone with an accessibility need to have to ask them to move, doesn't it? And I always find that creates this awkwardness. It's a full train, and suddenly the person with an accessibility need is having to do all of the hard work and confront and ask, and why can't we? As a culture, I think in Japan they have a culture where those seats are never occupied by people who don't need them. Is a cultural thing. They wouldn't dare. We don't always have that culture in the UK. Do sort of. There's a certain Andy Barrow: politeness in other parts of the world that does dictate that. But then also if you look culturally at the other parts of the world, there are differences in attitudes toward disability there. Some of that is actually because people will be thinking, well, I don't want people to think I'm disabled, not for the right reasons, maybe for the wrong reasons, because in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with having an impairment or disability. I'm not going to get into the whole. Some people don't like the term disability because they say it's the physical world that disables us. I'm impaired. Disability implies I'm less than. For me, that's semantic, but some people don't like the idea that they might be seen as having a disability for that reason. So I think it's a difficult one. But I totally get your point of having to be the person, to have the confrontation, to have the awkward conversation. That's a really difficult one. An easy example as well would be something. I don't take the bus as often, but I do take the bus. And if you have ever got on a bus, you will see the signs that say there's normally one space for a wheelchair and it's wheelchairs or buggies, and the sign just says, wheelchairs take precedent over buggies, essentially, and you're expected to have that fight. So, in theory, if I got on a bus and there was a young single parent there, and she or he had, say, two young kids in a buggy, a further baby in arms, I could actually get there and go, move, get out of the way, sort that out, fold the buggy up, do something. And for me, that's kind of not right. So we're expected to have that argument. And sometimes the rules are so rigid that it will be one or the other. I've seen people have to get off the bus for that, rather than just kind of sorting it out with the driver's help. And sometimes the driver abdicates responsibility. That's for a whole other set of reasons. I'm sure the driver, he or she is kind of pilloried all day, every day with that thing. But the point is, it's left in the middle for people to sort out, and we don't really yet have those tools to do that. And part of the reason I do this is so that we can all talk to each other and not be scared about saying the wrong thing or asking why people need certain things. Yeah, I think that's important Joanne Lockwood: to remember that the. The driver, the passenger safety representative, however they're described, they get a lot of stick by a lot of people and a lot of conflicting priorities. So I certainly wouldn't want to cast any doubt in their professionalism. But I've travelled with a friend of mine who uses a wheelchair, it's a powered wheelchair on London buses all around London, and I've seen the challenges she experiences, one getting the driver's attention. She's had bites. Just drive off, leave them on the curb without spotting her. Then there's the often she'll end up with this driver who I was going to say, grumpy kind of. You feel there's a big grudging. This is impacting his schedule, putting behind time, having to get out the bus, lower the ramp, allow my friend to get on, and then when she's on, she has to fight her way between the people who are there. It's quite crowded. And then sometimes the driver will say, next time, would you mind reversing in because it's easier then, or easier for who? Often we're designing these things for easier for everybody else, not easier for the person who has the disability or the accessibility needs. And just having spent many, many journeys with her using public transport, I've got a lot more empathy for the needs of accessible transport for people. And not everybody has the luxury of a powered wheelchair. We've got people using manual driven wheelchairs or manual push with their arms and not everybody has a personal assistant or a carer with them. And there's always this assumption that if you have a disability, you're going to have someone with you to help. But that's not the case, is it? No, it certainly isn't the Andy Barrow: case. And this whole idea of public confidence in travelling, a lot of the reason I do what I do is I've been very lucky, I've been very privileged to have. Just the way the chips fell for me. I had an accident that changed my life at 17, but then I got into sport and sport took me all over the place and it gave me a lot of confidence. And to use the word epiphany is a good word, I sort of realised a few years ago, okay, I'm helping myself, but I am helping other people as well, because for every person like me who maybe encounters a negative travel experience, gets a little bit annoyed, gets a bit angry, makes some phone calls, is a bit dogged about, it has the articulation, the education to maybe fire off a letter, argue the toss with the powers that be. There are many other people who just don't have the time, are not able to put that stuff together and remain emotionally, even while they're kind of delivering their grievance and lack the confidence to either use the surface again, and worst of all, think it's their fault. When I have some kind of negative travel experience, always put myself in the position of the person. My imagined person, who maybe doesn't get out very often, has been building themselves up to make this trip, because either they are anxious about it or they're excited about it for a long time. And when it goes wrong, they kind of almost go home with their tail between their legs and are really sad about it and take some time to get over that and think it's their fault. And that's kind of why I do what I do, because I can. I can kind of have these arguments, hopefully on behalf of people. I don't want that to sound martyrish, but I feel like if you're in a position where you're okay, then you try to help other also, you know, for example, I'm lucky I have a car. I could just get annoyed. Get in my car. If I get really annoyed, I could just get on Uber and get a taxi and go home. And some people don't have any of those facilities in my wheelchair. I have a tiny wheelchair. It weighs about twelve kilogrammes. It breaks down very small. I can pretty much get in any car. I don't need ramped access in a car. Whereas I suspect your friend that you mentioned as an example would need a taxi with ramp access. And that has its own issues. A car of a certain size. So it all swings around about. So we all have pluses and minuses. But I just feel like I'm kind of very lucky on this front, and I need to speak up for people who aren't as lucky but also have the perspective to be able to play both sides on this. To your point of drivers and staff who sometimes get abused for just trying to do their job. My friend's been Joanne Lockwood: on a train, and when she gets to say she wants to get off at, there's nobody available to help her with the ramp. So then the train just basically closed the doors and goes off. So she's now effectively being held prisoner by the train company, transported somewhere she doesn't want to be and has to have that argument. She doesn't want to have that argument. She wants to go home, see? Wants to have her tea. Now she's in a situation where she now has to get angry. She has to get upset. She has to start talking to people. And it's again and again and again. I'm not sure how often it happens, but probably several times a year this has happened to her. Yeah. Andy Barrow: It's hard to explain that frustration. It's also hard to explain that anxiety that something may happen. It's hard to physically quantify that. Everyone that's in a minority will have a. Have a similar thing. You know, whether it's you know, you know, a consequence of. Of their colour, a consequence of their gender. You know, everyone will have that understanding who's not in the absolute majority. You know, what's. What's interesting for me is looking wider at diversity, but for the fact that I happen to break my neck when I was 17, I'd be the absolute majority. I'm sort of white, western male, 40 years old. And so it has given me a different perspective. It's opened me up to a lot of different communities to understand that. But back to the transport. Yeah, that anxiety, I feel that as somebody who I think is pretty confident, and you have that idea of, what am I going to do here? How am I going to get round this? And it's not a case of I can't travel, it's a case of, right, I'm going to have to get some people to break the rules, I'm going to have to enlist unsolicited help. So I'm looking around for the platform for a couple of people who might be strong enough to lift me onto the train, knowing full well that, what station am I going to? Is it a through station? By that I mean is it a station where the train isn't terminating there? So I have a finite amount of time to get my arm out of the door and stuff like that. The reason I work at Southeastern is so this doesn't happen and so we can hopefully all turn up and travel as and how we want. Mistakes are always going to happen, but for me also is how those mistakes are dealt with. And I think a big frustration for people with disabilities on public transport is just the time that it takes for you. Your friend, okay, she misses her stop. It's a pain, all right? But if it was one stop and you got back straight on the next train and it was ten minutes and you were done, you'd be like, all right, well, that was a pain, but it was done a bit like, I don't know, forgetting where you parked or something like that, but it's when it mounts up and it's those time costs taken out of your day every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year. I think there was a really interesting article a few months back that likened having sort of a severe disability to having a job that equated to about 30 hours a week in terms of your time cost just to live. That's not even transport. That's things like just getting yourself dressed and stuff like that. And again, you want to be able to get all this across without martyring too much. That's always my angle as a person in a minority, because I'm a firm believer that you need to represent your minority and whether you like it or not, you're an ambassador for it. So the bitter disabled guy is a really bad look. Can I help you, sir? No, piss off. Why would you ask me for help? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because the next person may need help. Joanne Lockwood: It's interesting you mentioned this martyrdom and the angry minority. Here we go again. The angry minorities trying to break the privilege wall down again. And all that happens is the armour goes up, doesn't it? The armour, the deflection, the water bowery, the kind of, oh, come on, don't be a snowflake. It's not that bad, really, just a little thing. As you're talking. I'm thinking about the guy on the plane, the one that his wheelchair wasn't delivered to the gate or was lost, and they offered him a pushed or an assistance wheelchair and he said, no, that's making me disabled. I want choice, I want advocacy. What's your take on that? No, absolutely. Andy Barrow: He's completely right. And I encountered that before I worked on the trains. Aviation was where I learned, as an athlete, you travel around in large groups, okay? So you have support staff. I understand mistakes are going to happen. If you're travelling as a twelve person squad. Each person has two wheelchairs. That's 24 wheelchairs. Things are going to happen. But if you're travelling on your own and your chair doesn't get brought to you, that is massively disempowering and it's embarrassing and insulting because you're sat there. You're like, I am a world class athlete and I don't know whether there's a couple of instances. It happened famously to Frank Gardner, didn't he, as the BBC correspondent? But it also happened to another guy who actually dragged himself through the airport. And I've met him, he's a lovely guy, he's a wheelchair racer. He's absolutely huge as well. So he's built like the proverbial. And he was in a situation where he could drag himself through the airport. But even as a full time athlete, when I was, I'm sort of much more severely disabled than him. So that wasn't available to me. But it's like, you're not going to demean someone of our strength, confidence and power by saying, we're going to push you through the airport. That's not the way we want assistance to work. We want to be empowered to be independent as individuals. And I've taken much more in recent years in aviation of having that conversation. But then I know my point of power. I know that if I remain in my seat on the plane, I know exactly how much that costs the airline every single minute that plane is delayed. But often the airlines get unfairly blamed for it because most airports actually contract assistant services to an organisation that does it across the airport. So there are all these different dynamics at play. But I find if you kind of remain polite and just talk about, say, look, this is the situation, I'm not going to change until you bring my chair back. There's no problem. I don't mind the mistake, I'm just looking for resolution. I'm not even too fast. Swift resolution isn't nice to have, but I know it's hurting you more than me, but can we just move you into a corridor? No, you can't, because then you're going to forget about me. And it's just having those conversations about when people will take your wheelchair from you. And the idea of that as well, the idea of what a wheelchair is, and it's not just a wheelchair, is so much more. It's very cliche to say it's your legs, but the simple fact of it is that without the specific wheelchair I use, I'd be way less independent. We'll go back to your friend again. If you put her in my wheelchair, it sounds like, as a power chair user, she'd barely be able to push it. It's no use to her, it's a piece of junk to her. Me sitting in her wheelchair would be no more than me going, oh, this is kind of fun. This is a bit of a toy, but I don't need it. I can't drive it like you can. Probably going to crash it into everything, break something off it and break someone in the process. These things are bespoke to us. We can't just change out of them. It's massively important. I mean, a good example would be, why don't you just wear someone else's glasses? Joanne? Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, completely. One thing to say, and I talk about this a lot, it's about. It's recognising that you should have a plan a, but also knowing that plan a doesn't always work. You don't get everything right first time and we all accept that things go wrong. What I say to people, an organisation should be judged by its plan b when it goes wrong, how do they step up? How do they put themselves out there and say, sorry, Andy, this isn't right for you. Come to you and say, what can we do to make this work for you? You say, thank you so much for asking. This is how I think we could solve the problem. But organisations trying to give you this one size fits all solution based on their perception of you without ever involving you and giving you agency about the decisions, because I know my own personal characteristic. If someone says to me, Joe, Joanne, what is going to make you happy in this scenario? Now I'll say, this is what's going to make me happy. This is how we can get out of it. Thank you for asking. I really feel so empowered again. And that must be the same for you. What's the plan b? Isn't it? Yes, definitely. We're back to our equality versus Andy Barrow: equity, aren't we? What is your ideal customer service experience? Somebody with the exact same disability as me may have a drastically different outlook on the world and that is to be respected, I guess, within the bounds of safety. It's a really interesting point, and it was funny that actually, I have to say, for Southeastern, the reason I'm now a consultant with them is because I had a bad experience with them in the beginning and I wasn't happy with the way it was dealt with. But when we broke it down and I got in and I spoke to some people face to face, I said, look, I think I can help. And they listened. So credit to them. So if I were to take that in a snapshot of a 24 hours period, it'd be like, oh, man, that was awful. Travel experience. If I take it in a snapshot of a two year period, I was like, wow. They listened to the point where they're now allowing and empowering me to try and help their staff make life better for other people with disabilities that use the network. So that plan B is an excellent point. Yeah. Joanne Lockwood: I genuinely believe that most organisations want to do the right thing. They believe they're doing the right thing. There's this corporate belief that we've got our policies, we've got people who will deal with this, we've got our customer service team who are person centric. All these good words. And I do believe that most big, large companies do set out with the right intentions. But what tends to happen is like this chinese whispers of intent. It gets dissolved down the chain and often it comes down to the one person you deal with, and that person has the power of influence on making your experience fantastic or poor. And it's almost like impossible for a company to predict that. What's your advice to companies in trying to make sure that the company culture really does permeate right down to the individuals on the floor? I think it's a really tough one. I Andy Barrow: normally refer back to my kind of sporting background as well. You have to look first at how you treat the employees in the company. We're almost getting to a point of company culture and engagement. We're almost kind of switching subjects to sort of employee engagement and giving them the understanding of why is it important? Why is it important that every person with a disability should be able to travel? Why is it important that everyone's gender should be respected? Why is it important that no customer or staff member should be abused? Have a protected characteristic abused? It's that understanding. It's knowing why people aren't getting the message, finding out a bit more about them. It's treating them well in order that they then want to treat the customer well, knowing it's also demystifying failure. And I'm a big one for people must fail. Everyone has to mess stuff up. All right? You wouldn't have learned to walk or make a cup of tea or write or get good at anything if you didn't mess it up a lot. That is what life is built on. But failure is so frowned upon in some organisational culture that people would rather avoid a problem than actually deal with it. And if you get avoidance of failure, you get blame culture. And when you get that, you get employees that don't feel empowered to be able to use their common sense to deviate slightly from the training they've had and see the wood for the trees, if you will. Because the bottom line with things is like, I'm a person standing in front of you, or sitting in front of you, a person asking for help. Are you going to be able to help me without hurting me or you? If at some point some minor rules got bent somewhere along the line, we can maybe look at that next time and see if you could do something slightly differently. But for now, we got it done. If you don't have that, you have a staff member looking at a person who needs help thinking, my manager told me I had to do X-Y-Z-I value this job. What if I don't do x, y and z to the letter and I get the sack? What's worse? Annoying one person in a wheelchair or losing my job? So I totally see it from both sides. That's why it has to start from company culture. We have to make it okay for our employees to make mistakes. Through learning or train. So they minimise the mistakes through learning on the job, which is where people like myself come in. People like yourself come in. If companies are looking to. Sort of. Alter how they view people and gender and trans culture, you can't just write it out of a manual. You need people who are living that experience to talk about their lived experience. And really importantly, why it's important that you should respect that. Joanne Lockwood: Completely agree. I think you've hit the nail on the head there. If your culture of your organisation is one of COVID up, one of it's the rules hiding behind the rules, then you can see that from a customer experience point of view. It's where people feel empowered. They know that their organisation is going to back them up if they make the right decision, maybe for the right reasons, and go outside of the rules. I think you see that all the time in airlines. Airlines have a very open culture around safety. Safety is paramount. And airlines are very quick to speak out on issues where safety is concerned. People look at their organisations and people sometimes accuse the NHS of being an organisation where things are covered up and people don't speak out. So again, it's trying to look at those two cultures. And maybe if you're listening today, what's your culture? Would you feel empowered to go the extra mile and make a difference to somebody? Or do you feel you had to hide behind the rules, or there's too many layers of management and permission to get, rather than saying, I can fix this for you, I can do this, and it's that two cultures, isn't it? What Andy Barrow: are the steps of having the confidence to be empowered as well? I think that's probably another conversation, how you have to treat people in order to flourish within the organisation, and everyone uses their kind of harmony for good rather than not. But it's interesting that you should mention the NHS. I mean, if anyone out there wants to read a good book, I think Matthew Sade's second book, called Black Box Thinking, actually compares directly the aviation industry and the health industry, because he rightly says, just about the most dangerous place to be in the world is in a pressure sealed tin can 40,000ft above the earth. If you make a mistake there, the consequences are fairly dire. So over the years, the aviation industry has very painfully broken open every crash in awful detail to be able to prevent it happening again. Whereas in the health industry, you've seen more and more cover up. So the advancement of that, and with particular reference to safety records, has been massively stilted compared to it. And it's that psychology, that psychology of dissonance, of ignoring problems that he kind of hones in on, because that's his kind of thing as a psych and a sports psych. But it really is interesting. It's interesting just how toxic blame culture is within organisations and how much it sort of stems any kind of creativity and progress. Joanne Lockwood: People sometimes are scared to say sorry, scared to say I apologise, scared to sometimes own take responsibility, aren't they? I mean, I hear people use the phrase, it's a mistake, it's a mistake. So not. I made a mistake. It is almost like depersonalising, pushing that away from them, not taking any responsibility for that. I didn't mean to. Well, you didn't mean to, but the impact was. So people often think about intent is the only part of the equation. But impact versus intent, that's a whole big equation. We got to think about how does it affect you as an individual? Isn't it? Absolutely. And I think you said it Andy Barrow: earlier, I think nobody means to make a mistake. That's us going back to sport again. People get frustrated with mistakes. That's in the past. We can't change it, actually, it's in sport. So it really doesn't bloody matter at this point in time. But I'm not going to get hung up on the mistake. We'll talk about it after. But nobody means to make. No one's going out there going, I'm going to make disabled people's days really bad on the public transport network today. No one's doing that. But it's that fear around being wrong, getting it wrong, failing. And the consequences of that, whether it is just the consequence to your ego or the consequence to your life if you lose job security through it, is actually placed a higher importance at the moment of getting it right. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. So when I talk to companies and do DNI audits, one of the questions on the questionnaire is, do you feel you can speak out without fear of recrimination? And that's a good way of judging a company culture. If you feel you can share anything and no one's going to come blame you for that, they're going to take that as good feedback. Maybe they're action, every item of feedback they get, but you can give feedback, give suggestions without fearing that someone's going to look at you and go, oh, they're a troublemaker or they're being awkward. Yeah. Andy Barrow: Feedback is really important. People having a right to reply, people having people feeling like they've been heard, particularly within, say, employment rank people feeling like they've been heard. And it's another important thing for people in the employment rank to see the managers and have access to them. When I work with the managers, I say, you have to do your walk arounds, you have to go and meet people, and you have to face the fact that as a manager, you may get somebody coming up to you that needs to vent and wants to tell you something. That's why you're a manager. You have to wear that. You don't necessarily need to act on it, because only a small part of it might be worth acting on, but people need that because then they feel heard and you feel like you're having a conversation and you're getting feedback for what is going on in the organisation. I think that's really important, because only through that transfer of information do we get the best possible outcomes to any problems that arise. And that's another thing with the transport network, really. The information is out there on how to do this. Just at the moment, it's siloed and we're not communicating properly, and we shouldn't feel awful about that. Every organisation is doing that. Every elite sports team strives to communicate the best they possibly can, to transfer messages in the most efficient way possible in order to make the correct decisions in split second environments. We don't have to do that in business, but we don't get the time to practise and train like sport does. But there is a sweet spot. Yeah, for Joanne Lockwood: sure. I was thinking, as a change, then, do you think this is perception that disability, or disabled as a word, it's a spectrum, isn't. I mean, we think about LGBT, you think about black people, brown people, people from all over the world, from various different ethnicities. We lump these people together as bame. We lump people together of different sexualities and genders as LGBT. And do we lump people together as disabled or with a disability? And one wheelchair person is like another wheelchair person? We design our services for this kind of. This middle person that doesn't really exist? Yeah, I think there is a tendency to do that, Andy Barrow: but to sort of defend things like institutions, buildings, public transport, there has to be that kind of. We need to cater to the bell curve as much as possible. What we're looking to do is widen that out to all possible scenarios. But, yeah, one person with a disability is drastically different to another. And where does disability stop as well? We're just now focusing in much more on hidden disability. We're focusing in much more on mental health as well as physical health. So mental illness as well as physical disability. But where does it stop? There's certain aspects of disability that have absolutely been eradicated in modern society as disabilities. And again, glasses is a good example. Okay, if I ask you to take your glasses off, you may well be able to navigate the world near perfectly. Just the crossword might give you some trouble. But for another person without their glasses, they're done. For left handed people, we've got someone like seven years. Yeah, all the best people are left handed, Joanne, so there you go. But life expectancy, seven years less, 200 years ago, you're a witch. If you are left handed or 100 years ago, someone's taking the pen out of your hand. Is it a disability? Not anymore. Is needing glasses a disability? Not anymore. Okay. In certain situations, is being a wheelchair user a disability? Not anymore. In fact, using a wheelchair is probably a damn site. Easier than having to walk on crutches and take every step and being in pain for some people, but it still is enough of a hindrance on our lives. So, yeah, to lump everyone in one category is kind of folly. What we're looking to do is bring it back to Joanne and Andy and what do you need? What do you need to make things better today? What do you need over and above what's there? And even what's the norm to make things better today? What do you need to put you at parity with everyone else travelling today? Joanne Lockwood: And this is where we go into this. People may have heard of the social model of disability rather than the physical model of disability, isn't it? Or the medical model where it's society that makes you less able to perform your day. Removing these societal constructs of curbs. And we invented curbs, we can de invent them or create other ways of working. Or we've invented taps that turn on like this, we can reinvent taps that turn on differently, et cetera. Exactly. Everything like that. Things like Andy Barrow: automatic doors and stuff like that. And the curb thing for me is always a really good example of empowerment. Because I've travelled a lot and worked a lot in Asia. I get asked, there's this misconception, this misconception that the west is fantastic disability and that Asia is very backward around it and it simply isn't true. If I had to draw one hard, fast distinction, I would say there's less empowerment in Asia. And what I mean by that is if we spot there's a curb in the west and it gets to be a pain in the backside for whatever reason, eventually someone will come along, put a drop curb in and everyone will go about their business. In Asia, what they may well do is station two people by the curb to lift the person up over the curb. The end result is the same, but it's very disempowering. We're not teaching people to help themselves and that's what we want to do. I don't want people to need to help me. I want to be able to go about my business as best I possibly can. That's something I'm able to do. There are always going to be people with disabilities, mental or physical, that are going to need permanent help and that's never going to go away. That person to person assistance around disability, whether it is in the sphere of travel or not, is never going to go away. So understanding what help people need, asking them if you're able to communicate with them what they need and understanding why they need it and how it makes them feel if they do or don't get it, is probably the important thing. Joanne Lockwood: I hear you completely and I think what I'm picking up from what you just said there is just going back to this plan b, isn't it? So, in the asian model of the curb, their plan b is carry you. What we're trying to say in the UK is our plan b is carry you once re engineer plan a so it works next time for you. So, yes, you can get away with it. Once a learning occurs, change occurs. Next time you access it, your plan a now works. That's what we're trying to say. We don't want plan b to be the default anymore. We want to learn and incorporate your needs into plan a. Learn and change. But then in some ways it's kind of Andy Barrow: really interesting because in some ways, when I travel to kind of far flung places, I'm less fussed about access issues because also, maybe the absence of more of a plan where that's concerned leads to people being far more helpful and understanding. Certainly nobody in Asia has ever told know I can't come into their nightclub because I might be a fire hazard, or they can't help me up the steps because it's more than my job's worth, mate. But that ties in culturally as well, because in Asia, a lot of the time, there's quite a lot of shame in failing. People are saying no, which is not an ideal thing, but I know that it's actually, if I want to go in that restaurant, it's got ten steps up to it. I'm going to go, can you help? And loads of people are going to come running and lift me. Now, that works for me specifically as a relatively light guy over relatively light chair who is okay getting lifted doesn't feel disempowered by that. Some people hate it, but I'm like, you know what? I want to go up there. I want to get on that boat. I've been carried like a bride across more than one beach in my life and slung on a boat because I wanted to be on a boat. I wanted to get in the sea. It was the only way it was going to happen, and I'm okay with that. But that's the point. The conversation took place and I said, can you help me do a thing? And they said, yes, I can. And health and safety is not in the way of that. We don't necessarily have that luxury over there because we've put health and safety rules in place. But if we've done that, then we must be able to see people within those. So we need to kind of scramble and make our plans a bit better again. But the key in those Joanne Lockwood: things you've just talked about is where the power resides. The power resides with you. Power of a choice. You're using your power of choice to enact what you want to happen. And if you think I'm here, boat's there, I want to go on the boat. There's a beach. The only way I can get on there is give me a chiggy back, stick me on your shoulder, wherever you need to do, because I want to do it more than that. Because you're empowered. You don't feel you've lost dignity. You feel you've achieved your objective. In that case, you are a Paralympian. So you've talked about this throughout our conversation so far. So I'm sure I'm dying to hear. Doing what? Where? How successful were you? Where did you go? Yeah, I Andy Barrow: mean, look, my story is rugby through and through, so I was kind of mining. I like sport growing up. Didn't mean I was any good at it. Just enjoyed team sport. Loved rugby sport for people of all shapes and sizes. There's a role for you on a rugby field. Unfortunately, I had a tendency towards the more dangerous jobs in sport, so. Goalkeeper, wicketkeeper, front row hooker, broke my neck playing rugby. Rugby is a very safe game. Incidentally, it's a freak accident. These things happen. They still do far less than they did. A good example of us making things safer and amending problems as best we can. But catastrophic injuries still occur. So I broke my neck. What that means for me is I'm paralysed from the chest down with limited use of my hands and a little bit of a deficit in my arms as well. So, looking round for sports, what sport am I going to play? Obviously wheelchair rugby, or murder ball, as it's better known. So I started playing wheelchair rugby first out, started playing it really to get my confidence back, to find a team sport that I could play. My life had changed hugely at that age to get physically fit with such a severe physical disability. About four fifths of my body doesn't work, because you understand how your body would. I need to make sure that that 20% worked as well as it possibly could for me to be able to achieve as much independence as I could in my life and do all the things I wanted to do. And I didn't know what they were, I was 17. But independence is really important. It feeds well, actually, into our conversation about why it's important that things are accessible and people can move around on their own, because independence. So, anyway, start playing wheelchair rugby, get good at it. You like something, you play it more, you practise more. The harder you work, the better you get. All that kind of stuff. And it really took me around the world, so I was very lucky. I went to three Paralympic games, a captain to the Great Britain wheelchair rugby team for about five years, won three european gold medals. Sadly, never got over the line in a Paralympics or a world, so never did better than fourth. That is a bad place to finish, but there you go. Wouldn't take it back. I was lucky enough to go to for my final tournament to be the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which was amazing. Just an unbelievable demonstration of teamwork and equality. Equity. The Paralympic game specifically is the biggest event for social mobility in the world. It's huge. And in the UK, we're some of the leaders in showing strong role models who happen to have disabilities. So it's done a lot for me and my life. It launched my career as a speaker, first in schools. It obviously gave me the knowledge within travel to do what I do now. So travel is kind of just a part of me. I still speak as well. Joanne Lockwood: Wow. A real olympian, as you're talking now. It popped some of my head. So currently we have the Olympics that people know and then we have the Paralympics. So two weeks, then a week, then two weeks again. Could we not have them interleave? So we don't have two separate events? Or do you think it's important to have a separate event? I think it's important for a couple of reasons. Andy Barrow: The first one is you don't want it to lose autonomy or be seen as second two. And now it has enough momentum to be a world event in its own right and huge. And I think that is correct, that it's front and centre and people see fantastic world class sport from people who happen to have disabilities. That idea of this is just disabled people having to go. Died of death a while ago, and probably the final nail in the coffin would have been London. If you know anything about sport, you know how hard these athletes work. They just happen to have a disability. The second is logistics. It's the biggest sporting event in the world, the Olympics, and it's represented by people from every single country. So over 200 countries in the world, you have an olympic village, houses x amount of thousands of people. You can't really, logistically just increase that by. The Paralympics is something like 50, 60, 70% the size of the Olympics. You can't really just nearly double the size of that event, which is already huge and requires its own village. We're talking about hosting 27 simultaneous world championships. When we talk about an Olympics, it's a bit of a scramble to just then go and host nearly 60. So for those two reasons, I'm happy with it being its own separate event. What I would do is every four years, I would change the order. So one, four years, Paralympics went first. One, four years, Olympics went first. And there's pros and cons to being first or second. I think Channel four spun it brilliantly in 2012 when they put all their ad campaigns out that said, thanks for the warm up, meaning the Olympics, it was like, yeah, you guys were the curtain raiser, now it's the real stuff, so you can spin it how you want it. And the fact is that so many people, the Paralympics in London, sold out, the tickets were cheaper. I don't care about that. That's market forces. Tickets are going to be cheaper in parasport, they're going to be cheaper in youth sport, they're going to be cheaper in women's sport. Is it right? Not necessarily. But does it get bums on seats? And if it does, that's fine by me. So it sold out. And I think a lot of people as well that were naysaying about the Olympics, saw how amazing it was and then scrambled and thought, I still want to be a part of that. I've never seen anything like it before or since. In terms of the adulation that we had as athletes, in terms of the spectator numbers, the crowds, people that just wanted to be involved. It was an absolute privilege and something I'll never ever forget. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I hear what you're saying there, and I think you're right. From having, again, it's about power and agency. It's your event for you. You and your fellow Paralympians are owning that event as a celebration of you. And it's not about trying to be the same as anybody else, it's about trying to be your own identity. And I think that's extremely important. Language obviously, is really critical around this stuff. And we talked earlier about whether you're with a disability, have a disability, a disabled user, a wheelchair user or all these various terms complex. And one thing I was thinking about as you're talking there is that we have women's football, we have women's cricket, we have women's tennis and then we have football, tennis and cricket. I want to keep women's football, women's cricket, women's tennis, but I want to have men's football. So what we don't have is men or male or the privilege is the default. Therefore we don't need to prefix it. So we have the men's football FA cup and we have the women's football FA or the Women's FA cup. So they're both prefix. That way women's football isn't seen as the second best, it's just seen as women's have meant. Or there's a whole nother conversation about degendering sport. But that's in a whole nother conversation. Let's not go into that. But I think it's important that we don't recognise women as being not the default. As being second best. Yeah, absolutely. Andy Barrow: I think it's a really good argument. I've had some involvement with the women's sport trust in the past and that point has definitely come up and been made. Because to say women's football, then football implies that football is the real football. That's not right. That's absolutely not right. And you'll see that in athletics it happens by default. In tennis it normally happens by default, because it's a way. Whose singles final is it? Well, it's the men's singles final or it's the women's singles final. And again, things like, as just mentioned, changing the order. Why not one year at Wimbledon, just have a women's final on the Sunday and the men's final on the Saturday was. What if it didn't matter in the first place? Why would it matter to switch it? I think it's really important to. I don't know about sort of degendering completely, because otherwise that's just confusing. What am I watching if I'm not being told whether it's men's or women's? So I'd rather you're proud about your gender within the sport? Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I think that was more about the conversation about whether nonbinary people had a non binary people compete in sport. There's huge debate around trans people, trans masculine, trans feminine people competing in their acquired gender and whether they have disadvantage or advantages around their performance. There's a whole debate around that. There are many sports where people's gender is not actually deciding factor and so people can compete fairly. So those are the sports we should be looking at saying, well, it actually doesn't matter if it's a woman's or a man's. But then there's also the argument that women still want to be proud and have their own event in the same way that you, as a Paralympian, want your own paralympic event, women want their own event as well. And that's quite right, but it's trying to work out how we create a freestyle, all style type event that people can opt to compete in if they want to as well. It's very interesting, actually, that in Andy Barrow: wheelchair rugby, it's actually a coed sport. We're able to do that by virtue of the classification system. Now, if you don't know what the classification system is, it's a way of us categorising the diversity of your disability, not how good you are at the game, but basically in a physical sense, in a very physical sense, how many muscles you have to play the game. And that has to happen because otherwise it's an unfair playing field. If you were a good example would be, I've said I'm paralysed from the chest down with limited use of my hands and arms. People with a disability in all four limbs are eligible to play my game. So in theory, somebody could come in who's just missing two legs from just below, just above the knee and missing their arms from the wrists. That person has their entire trunk to their disposal and stuff like that. They can move and they can navigate the court in an entirely different way. To me, so we have to award points, numbers, so we can say, you're worth this many points on the floor, because we have to draw the lines somewhere and that's how we are actually able to fit women into the male framework. Whether we get to a point where our sport grows and the women. There have been some women's only events, but at the minute, the women really enjoy playing the mixed version of the sport. And it's just one of those happy idiosyncrasies about sport and disability and the way it works that we can make that fit into the classification. Women play at half a point less than men for their disability because we had a big conversation about it and went through the well, if you're disabled, you're disabled, it doesn't matter. But we took into account your bone density, your fat to muscle ratio, and we were like, actually, no, as a woman, you are at a disadvantage if you have the same functionality as a male. So you play half a point less, which is really interesting, because in theory, in our game, the best possible team in an imagined future would be four female players. So it's a really interesting concept and it's not here nor there. It's just a nice thing to kind of think about and a neat little solution that we've made in a very niche part of the world. I Joanne Lockwood: said the same. When we look at whether we can level the playing field in terms of men's sport, women's sport, or even making it trans accessible, is learning from paralympics, learning from ways we can value each person as an individual and give. I mean, sport is a human right. Competing competition should be a human right. So we can allow everybody to compete at their sport in the way they can, without feeling discrimination or without feeling they've got to apologise for being a bit taller or a bit shorter. Absolutely. I mean, I Andy Barrow: think it's really hard. It's really hard in competitive sport, particularly where trans is concerned. Sort of interested to sort of hear what you think about where physicality is not the deciding factor, that's one thing. And then sort of wheelchair rugby, although the sport is a contact sport, it's the chairs that get smashed to bits. We have these special wheelchairs around us. We smash them to bits every 18 months. Direct person to person contact. How this is where some people will get squeezed out just on the safety factor. To other people, not themselves. Your own safety is your choice. And that's a really difficult one, because I'm looking and thinking specifically at rugby and about articles I've read around sort of trans athletes in rugby, and it feels really difficult. And if I'm honest, I don't know the answer. No, I don't know the answer Joanne Lockwood: either. I think from my personal view is that there are lots of views, lots of opinions, lots of people to take into account and the best solution is to sit down collectively and have an open discord and a constructive outcome for everybody. It's trying to move the bell curve, as you were saying, not just to be narrow, to try and widen that bell curve. So there's more people included, and if you don't fit the criteria, you understand why you don't fit the criteria and there's a plan b. Maybe there's another competition for people who don't quite fit this bell curve criteria. We've got another one that caters for these people and we do it differently. And I think somehow there's got to be a solution somewhere where everybody feels they're gaining and nobody feels they're losing. Yeah. Andy Barrow: The Paralympic model isn't a bad place to start, although it's not without its issue, because we are seeing things as a big thing going on in wheelchair basketball at the moment, whereby a lot of the top classes, so we're going to say the most able classes, are getting reclassed and some of those people are being told they aren't disabled enough to play because they have minimal disabilities. But there's no way those people are going to be able to compete on an equal footing in able bodied basketball. Yes, they have minimal disabilities compared to somebody like myself, in fact, compared to many wheelchair basketball players. So it's imperfect. There are going to be people that get squeezed out. There are going to be people that fall on the right side of the lines, people that fall on the wrong side of the lines. If ever you watch a wheelchair race, for example, and somebody wins by a ridiculous margin, as a person with a slightly more trained eye, your immediate thought might not necessarily be, wow, they're so much better than everyone else. You're like, wow, there's quite a lot of function going on there. Not that they're in the wrong class, but they're the optimal level of functionality for the class they're in. So there's always going to be that problem you have it in rugby with, say, when you look at maori players compared to, say, white players in New Zealand or anywhere around the world, for that matter, because of the lean muscle to fat ratio and stuff like that. But that's the way you're born, and that's a difference now that comes up against trans. If you feel like you're born in the wrong body. And Joanne Lockwood: sport often is leveraging every advantage you have as a human being to win. And elite male athletes, swimmers, sprinters, they're leveraging their bone structure, their muscle, their history, their background, their culture, all the things that make them them, their mental attitude as well. So it's a combination of being. Using your body and your mind to win at all costs is kind of the theory, isn't it? So if we start denying people the ability to use their body to the maximum, then we have to start classifying people who are from different continents, different racial backgrounds, and saying, well, hang on a minute, your children thinner, traditionally, than people from this country, and people in this country are generally more overweight, less sun, et cetera. So then we end up classifying everybody and that becomes even less fair, doesn't it? That's the thing. And to use a Andy Barrow: very controversial word in the best possible way, and this has been sort of done before, the freak aspect is what makes sport awesome. And it was another great channel four marketing campaign because it called the Paralympians freaks of nature before it called them superhumans. And then everyone got up in arms about it. Whoa. We call Usain bolt a freak of nature and it is an entirely positive label we give him. So they were just playing with that idea of people's interpretation of what freak means. If you've lived an attitude all your life and you grew up running God knows how many miles every day or cycling up and down mountains every day. Yeah, your entire. Gosh, the words gone right out of my head. Your entire physiology is going to be different. How do you think Sherpa in Nepal drag rich people up Everest every single day? Not rich people that aren't experienced, but Sherpa simply be able to just nip up and down like it's not a problem. And that's environment. It's a really complex and interesting conversation. Joanne Lockwood: And I think we'll let our listeners ponder on that conversation and thought, maybe if you're listening and you have an opinion, then do drop me a line and tell us about it. Maybe you'd like to come on a future podcast episode and talk about your perspective on this topic. Well, Andy, it's been absolutely awesome. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I can't believe how quickly the hour has flown by. And hopefully a couple of listeners are still with us out there listening along, because I'm sure that there's so much to take, inspiration from, so much to ponder. You've got immense amount of experience and you're doing some fantastic work to promote accessibility on transport and in the world. So how can our listeners get in touch with you? You got a website? Andy Barrow: Yes. Simple for me. Cheque me out. Www. Dot andybarrow. Co. UK. So, Barrow Barow and you can find all my social channels on that. So through that website you'll be able to hit my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my email is Andy at andybarrow. Co. UK. So pretty simple. It's pretty simple. And Joanne Lockwood: you're open to people just randomly connecting on LinkedIn or doing an inquiry for speaking or consultancy, et cetera? Absolutely, yeah. Please do get Andy Barrow: in. Know if you've enjoyed what we've said today. If you got anything to add or you think I can help you, then yeah, please do get in touch. Thank you so much. Well, a huge Joanne Lockwood: thank you to the listeners for tuning in and sticking with it. Please share this podcast with your friends and do subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues. I have a number of exciting guests lined up and I'm sure you'll be inspired by them over the next few weeks and months. If you'd like to be a guest, please let me know. I'd welcome your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve the show. So drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. My name is Joanne Lockwood and it has been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.