Well-meaning but heading down the path to oblivion

Dec 3 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

GIVEN this column’s love affair with the British countryside, it was with alarm that I read about the threat to kissing gates and stiles from what can only be described as yet another bout of political correctness.

This particular strand of rural micro-management started with the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995, but it seems that local authorities have only just caught up 12 years later with its application to these small, but useful stalwart features of the rural landscape.

The 1995 Act states that public services should make “reasonable adjustments” to allow disabled access and this has led local authorities to interpret the law as being applicable to these structures as they pose an unacceptable obstruction to the disabled.

In response, the farming community argue that they provide cheap and practical means by which the contradictory activities of enclosing livestock and allowing public access can co-exist.

To complicate matters further, councils claim they are not receiving enough funds to pay for alternatives such as cattle-grids, each of which costs several hundred pounds, with Suffolk County Council leading the way in taking responsibility for this perceived problem.

The drive to make these amends on behalf of the disabled comes from central government, which claims that a footpath is a highway and must be maintained as such. In other words, every highway must be inclusive to all users, no matter what their disability.

While my heart goes out to all those whose only mobility is a wheelchair, I feel that it is impossible to implement such far-reaching laws. You can almost see the final outcome, which will be the mass closure of footpaths because the law will be enforced and there is no money to pay for feasible alternatives. Neither will farmers want to risk court cases and fines for non-compliance.

A related experience I have of this matter regards plans to upgrade the Rainhill Railway Museum. This delightful little commemoration of the 1829 Rainhill Trials for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (the world’s first passenger railway) is imaginatively housed in a 50-year-old former British Railways baggage coach. However, the exhibition’s future is in doubt, as any proposal to refurbish the exhibition will involve the near-impossible task of installing a wheelchair lift between ground level and the static vehicle. Prohibitively expensive at more than £30,000, I believe, it is not worth the work if funding can be found.

The likely outcome is that the baggage carriage will be scrapped, in spite of it now also representing a lost railway era when baggage and parcels were carried in bulk. If I was wheelchair bound, I’d be horrified that do-gooding bureaucrats would initiate such a chain of events. Even enjoying normal mobility, I can categorically state I’m incapable of climbing the north face of the Eiger or swimming the English Channel, but I don’t want them removed so that others can’t indulge.

Such flexibility of mind is not shared by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who graciously announced it did not expect local authorities to replace all gates “overnight”.

“Where a kissing gate or stile is an historic feature, there is no reason why it could not be left in place alongside a structure that is easier to use for those who have mobility problems,” a spokesman says.

The UK Disabled People’s Council also takes a no-compromise stance, saying it fully supported improvements to countryside access. That’s fine, as its spokeswoman Anne Pridmore says: “Disabled people have as much right to go into the countryside as non-disabled people.”

Kissing gates evolved over hundreds of years and have proved their practicality. Replacement ordinary gates would inevitably get left open, accidentally allowing livestock to escape.

John Collen, Suffolk chairman of The National Farmers’ Union, raised a note of common sense: “I want to know where this is all going to end. Are we going to see paths across fields hard-surfaced so that they can be used by wheelchairs at any time?”

It’s an example of well-meant legislation suddenly being over-zealously and irrationally applied.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk