I'm with Chris on this.
Some of the comments on this thread almost treat the issue of disability as "black and white" but the simple fact that the legislation calls for "reasonable adjustments" tells you that it is shades of grey and you have to consider each situation on its own merits.
Our local supermarket was built a long, long time ago. When a different chain bought it they spent £4m on its refurbishment and remembered to put in a couple of lifts.
What they forgot to do was put in a ramp access at ground floor footpath level and within a couple of days of the grand reopening of the shop under its new ownership it was shut down until "reasonable adjustments" were made.
For many typical wheelchair users the lifts were entirely irrelevant as the lifts gave access to the car park, which, somewhat unusually is on top of the shop, along with some flats.
So, in this case the scenario was towards one end of the spectrum. Absolutely obvious that in a very busy street, the supermarket has to cater for wheelchair users, the blind or partially sighted, the deaf or partially hearing and just about any other disability you could think of.
But in the scenario presented in this thread you have to consider how likely it is that a disabled person will apply for employment (or have other reason to need access to the raised platform), WHAT their disability might be AND when this may happen.
Of course it is USUALLY more expensive to retrofit the solution but NOT if the need is in 20 years time.
If the cost is X now but Y later, then you need to do some discounting to work out whether Y in say 10 years time is actually more ££ and other costs than X now.
This is no different to working out what is reasonably practicable over a time frame and most investment decisions include some variant of Cost Benefit Analysis before getting the go ahead.
So, you do your (very sophisticated) risk assessment and conclude that in the next 25 years, a hazard in the design poses a risk that is deemed likely to kill one person, seriously maim two people and cause minor injuries to 40 others.
So, the Value for Preventing a Fatality (VPF) is about £2m at 2023 prices according to UK Department for Transport figures.
The Value for Preventing an Injury (VPI) that serious maims is about £200,000 per person x two = £400k
The VPI for the less serious injuries is say £10k, so x 40 people = another £400k.
So, the total cost of the injuries you want to prevent over 25 years is about £2.8m.
...and to do what is reasonably practicable you have to show that your spend is NOT "disproprortionate" or NOT "grossly disproportionate".
So, YOU choose whatever Disproportionality Factor (DF) you want to apply to the £2.8m - HSE says in R2P2 that a DF of more than 10 is unlikely to be appropriate but I would suggest that usually a much smaller number would be more likely - perhaps 1.25 is you follow the "disprortionate" or say 2-4 if you go with the "grossly" so.
Let's go with a DF of 4, so now you need to be thinking of spending £11.2m NOW to prevent £2.8m loss mounting up over 25 YEARS.
The Value Engineering team are going to rip your analysis apart and point out that this facility will go through a number of upgrades in that 25 years, so perhaps you should delay part or all of your safety investment.
Exactly the same applies to this disability scenario.
You could go back to the drawing board and redesign the whole facility to make wheelchair access inherently easier OR you can spend a lot of money to sort the problem in the design NOW, OR you can put off the decision until it is relevant, knowing that the facility might NEVER need to be altered for this particular type of disability and that it is perhaps as likely that it will need to be adapted to take account of one or more OTHER types of disability.
Edited by user 02 March 2023 15:52:17(UTC)
| Reason: Minor edit