Good Afternoon, 

The company I work for are looking to reconfigure a reception area to make more meeting rooms, to do this they would need to decommission the disabled toilet on the ground floor.  There is still a disabled toilet on the 2nd floor which can be accessed by 2 passenger lifts.  We have no disabled persons working in the building at the present time.

My question is, would this be acceptable?

Thanks in advance

Angela

Hi Angela,

Acceptable to who / whom? (grammar ?)

Would you remove all the toilets on the other floors and have everyone going to the second floor?

It appears that most modern building projects are installing more accessible and multi use 'changing places' toilet facilities.

It does depend on potential number of users too, your company doesn't currently have any 'disabled' people but there are other conditions that make the use of an accessible toilet a more dignified prospect than standard designs - such as people with a stoma or needing to use catheters.

Does your company have many visitors? a reception area or nearby is likely to be a more favourable location for such facilities that a couple of lift journeys and 2 floors away. 

Put the meeting room on the second floor?

Best Regards,

S

Check with local planning - the permission to erect / convert the building would have had certain accessibility conditions applied including disabled/access facilities

At the last major site works we had no employee categorised as disabled but it was a condition of the consent that disabled parking bays were marked

If you remove ALL toilets from the ground floor such that all have to use the lift then you may get away without a potential Equality Act clim.  Also I suspect that the orignal planning consent was including the disabled toilet on the ground floor.  I despair at the number of organisations that think they can just remove disabled facilities, or make it more difficult for disabled people without real thought.  Strictly the Building Regs anticipate thatdisabled facilities should only be used by disabled persons.

I don't know the layout of the building in question, but from the brief description so far I would think that the option of removing the disabled toilet should not even be entertained. Meeting rooms can be put almost anywhere in a building; it is hardly ever the case that anyone needs to access them quickly, whereas with toilets it's a different matter. Would the rest of your staff be happy with having to take the lift to get to a toilet?

The big problem with the Equality Act, as was the case with the DDA before it, is that it is a toothless piece of legislation, in that there is no body appointed to enforce it. If an individual feels discriminated against in the employment situation, the onus is on the individual to take the company to an employment tribunal, or if it is acccess to services, to a county court. Most people willl feel unable or unwilling to take either option, so companies get away with discrimination. The Equality and Human Rights Commission do occassionally take test cases, but in my experience the Commision is a complete waste of time. There is therefore an expectation that employers will do the right thing.

Good news about the employment tribunals, but I still think they have a long way to go to provide an equitable access to justice. The tribunal is not a level playing field. The company against which a case is taken have the resources to commission legal representatives, even barristers, to argue their case. The individual taking the action does not, and in the majority of cases has to try and argue their case against legal experts. Hardly a fair situation. Either the employer is prohibited from engaging legal experts, or both sides have this option through providing reasonable legal aid to the individual. It's as simple as that, and until the tribunal is a level playing field, it will not function as the people in charge of them seem to believe they do.