Social policy professor Peter Beresford once described Doug Paulley, who I interviewed for today’s Guardian, as as a “caped care home crusader”.
Paulley is known for his wheelchair priority case against transport company FirstGroup, hinging on whether bus firms are required to force people with pushchairs to vacate wheelchair spaces.
His initial win was overturned on appeal and is due to be heard in the Supreme Court in June in a move that could, as campaign group Transport for All says, “set a legal precedent for enforceable priority over wheelchair space”. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) supports Paulley’s case, and his awareness-raising helped win him the Sheila McKechnie Foundation award for campaigner of the year 2015.
Paulley has won almost all the 40 disability discrimination cases he has launched over the last decade. Paulley, who lives in a care home and uses a wheelchair, is an activist, not a lawyer. He has represented himself in all but three actions, challenging equality and accessibility barriers in organisations from pub chains to supermarkets and theatre firms. He has won around £10,000 in compensation over 10 years, he estimates, by bringing complaints under the Equality Act in the small claims court.
He welcomes last weeks damning Lords select committee report on the Equality Act 2010 and disability, which chastises the government for failing disabled people in its duty of care. Paulley was invited to give evidence to the select committee and is quoted in the report.
He answers critics who claim he’s motivated by money or that he enjoys being “a bully” – in fact he often donates damages to activist groups and stresses that the compensation amounts involved are “dwarfed by legal fees” – a reference to high-earning lawyers who represent service providers (the small claims court maximum award is £10,000 but discrimination-related claims generally fall between £600 and £6,000).
The full piece on Paulley, who volunteers at a local Oxfam and has fundraised for disability charity the Calvert Trust, is here.