[Default] On Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:08:26 +0100, a certain chimpanzee,
The Natural Philosopher , randomly hit the
keyboard and wrote:

OK Hugo, I was being 'jocular' when I called it ********.

I am of te age when not only do I have semi disabled elderly people
visiting me, but two friends who are paraplegic - one due to an
accident, the other due to polio.

I also built a house and was required to do many things to comply with
disability regulations. Almost NONE of which were of any value to these
two gentlemen both of whom had to spend THOUSANDS on equipping there
flats and houses with stuff arranged to make their disability bearable.

Both house and flat were brand new and complied with 'disability'
regulations.

So although person A can get in his front door in a wheelchair and to
and from his manually equipped car, he couldn't get out of his French
windows - there was a 6" drop to the grass! Nor was there a path from
the front to the rear of that house. Terraced.

Neither could he use his kitchen AT ALL until the worktop was lowered,
and all the sockets moved, and all high level storage replaced by low
levels storage.

Bathing and ****ting required a totally reconstructed toilet/bathroom.

At which point I decided that the whole BCO disability cmpliance was
********. It would have been better, and I would happily have complied,
to charge me £1,000 quid for NOT having done any disability stuff and
put it in a pot for my mates to help defray the cost of what they
absolutely HAD to have done to have anything approaching a normal life.

The requirements for access to and use of dwellings are minimal. They
are designed to remove some of the barriers to those with some of the
worst disabilities (e.g., mobility) from visiting other people in
their own homes. They are not designed to provide lifetime homes that
can more easily be adapted if and when required to accommodate more
tailored needs.

I had an insight into this recently, with my elderly mother who was
unable to go for Xmas dinner to mine or my sister's house, due to
having no GF toilet. Likewise she struggled to make it over steps into
our houses.

Things like a level threshold, installing lightswitches and sockets in
new houses between 450mm-1200mm above the floor, 775mm doors, etc.
cost virtually nothing, but are a hassle to change if needed. They are
the most that the housebuilding lobby would allow. It was a massive
battle for the 'disabled lobby' (e.g., charities) to get that much
against the housebuilding lobby who write the Regulations.

Oh, I'm sorry; are you under the impression that the Building
Regulations Advisory Committee isn't staffed by paid lobbyists from
the NHBC and other vested interests, and that Ministers don't take
account of the same lobbyists views when approving that legislation?
--
Hugo Nebula
"If no-one on the internet wants a piece of this,
just how far from the pack have I strayed"?