Disabled people’s organisations suggest how greater government support could produce future ‘utopia’

Disabled people’s organisations have imagined a future in which disabled people live in an “equitable” society with an AI-assisted economy that produces full employment, as part of government-funded research that hopes to produce more “strategic and proactive” policy-making.

The research, commissioned by the government’s Disability Unit*, was designed to explore how the needs and experiences of disabled people in the UK might evolve over the next five, 10, and 20 years.

Researchers worked with disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) including Disability Rights UK, Deaf Ethnic Women’s Association, and Inclusion Scotland, to examine potential policy changes across artificial intelligence (AI), employment, climate change, social security, cost of living and social attitudes.

Through interviews and online workshops, they created three “radically” different future worlds: a world with no climate change and a high standard of living; an equitable world with a high cost of living; and an AI-assisted world where disabled people are in full employment.

Each world was based on “extreme hypothetical outcomes” – such as the full reversal of climate change or an AI-assisted world with full employment – to produce “novel” insights and ways to enable change in the real world.

The three future worlds were: a world with no climate change and a high standard of living; an equitable world with a high cost of living; and an AI-assisted world where disabled people are in full employment.

Although these worlds were often “aspirational or utopian”, the DPOs identified several key developments that could produce a more positive future.

A central “enabler” for these utopian future worlds was for government to drive change by increasing funding for public services, fully adopting the social model of disability, and more robustly enforcing legislation like the Equality Act 2010.

The private sector was also seen as a vital enabler – although one that was not as important as the government – particularly in developing inclusive assistive technologies and AI tools that could remove human bias from recruitment and improve disability employment rates.

The DPOs also suggested that more disabled people in leadership roles, elected office, and the media, could push society towards a more utopian future.

And they suggested that disabled people should be actively involved in local and national decision-making, while improving public awareness through education was “seen as essential to overcoming current discrimination and the negative perception that disabled people are a ‘strain’ on public resources”.

The mostly positive views of the future contrasted with the researchers’ findings of a “very negative” set of current trends across the six policy areas.

The DPOs said the government had “an enormous role” to play in funding services to support disabled people, enforcing legislation to ensure their rights, and involving them in policy-making, while it could also “lead by example and set the tone for inclusion of disabled people across UK society”.

Many of those taking part in the research said disability discrimination and exclusionary attitudes were “major challenges that need to be overcome to build a more optimistic future”.

The report adds: “Some participants expressed concern that current social attitudes were in fact going ‘backwards,’ and becoming more exclusionary than 10 or 20 years ago.”

*The study was carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)

Picture from a public event held by Hammersmith and Fulham Disabled People’s Commission in 2017-18