December 2023 marks 60 years since the founding of RiDC.
To celebrate this anniversary, our outgoing Chair of Trustees, Dr Phil Friend, looks back at the charity’s work and gives his personal perspective on how life has changed for him as a disabled person since the 1960s.
“RiDC started life as the Research Institute for Consumer Affairs and was established by Michael Young, a social innovator who had a passion for building organisations to meet social needs. The original focus for RICA was to examine issues that affected all consumers, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that its work shifted its attention to the needs of disadvantaged consumers."
“I first got involved in the late 1990s. The Disability Discrimination Act had been introduced a few years earlier and it made a huge difference. It didn’t make the worId a perfect place but suddenly we had rights.
“I use a wheelchair as a result of contracting polio at the age of three and, at the time of the DDA, I was working as a disability consultant. RICA asked me to get involved in their research on photo booths. Rarely seen these days, these were cubicles in shops and railways stations you could sit in and have your photo taken, often used for passport photos.
“If you’ve ever seen one, you’ll probably know there was no way on earth a wheelchair user could get inside!
“That initial involvement piqued my interest and it wasn’t long after that I was invited to join the board of trustees.
“RiDC used to do a lot of work with government departments but with a changing political landscape, it became clear that we needed to look commercially and develop our work with businesses. It was about this time that we began to develop our consumer response, the beginnings of our panel. We started with only around 100 people.
“We were still seen largely as a provider of information for disabled people but when Gordon joined as our CEO five years ago, he changed that and put much greater focus on research informed by our panel’s responses.
“We’re such a vibrant organisation now that’s disability led and I’m terribly proud of it. Our panel now has more than 4,000 disabled members, and if you ask me about the future of RiDC, I’d say it’s really down to them. That involvement - disabled people leading the agenda - is a big shift.
“Expectations of disabled people are what’s really changed in my lifetime. Sixty years ago, we were seen as dependent. Activities tended to be therapeutic – I remember basket weaving and rug-making – but now, there is an expectation that those of us who can, should work, and that’s good.
“In terms of buildings, trains, gadgets, you can see a massive shift; things are, in many ways, better. The biggest issue still is attitudinal.
“Some of it is ignorance, some of it is blatant discrimination – “I don’t want people who look like you or behave differently on my premises.” There has been change, and younger people especially are not surprised to have disabled friends or colleagues because there’s greater integration in education and in the workplace.
“But when I go to conferences and hear ‘diversity’ being discussed, disabled people sometimes don’t get mentioned. If they, do it’s an afterthought. Yet this could be any one of us. The fact that we’re all living longer now means the chances of being disabled in your later life are very high. Around 17 % of people are born with a disability, but the majority of us will die with one.
“With RiDC, I’ve been involved in research projects on everything from the design of carriages for the HS2 to sandwich packaging. My role as Chair of RiDC comes to an end next year and I will miss it. But I’d still like to have my five penneth in the conversation as a member of the panel.”
- Dr Phil Friend
