oobster

Anyone in the Health & Safety fraternity, please advise.

We have our head office in Reading and it's split onto two floors - ground and first.

Ground floor is mainly meeting rooms and a store, with separate male & female toilets. There is no lift to the 1st floor.

Currently no-one working there is disabled, and we don't really get visitors - certainly not un-invited visitors.

My question is: Do we, based on the above info, need to make the building user-friendly for disabled people? Like building a disabled toilet for instance (and if so, what size does it need to be?)

Many thanks for all sensible replies.

DCI Gene Hunt

Certainly, where practicable to do so you should adopt a culture of non-discrimination against disabled staff & visitors, but if your building is old it doesn't mean you should run out and spend money converting it with lifts & the sort.

You need to make allowances for disabled people rather than converting the entire building, the Building Regulations cover this for new builds but I'm not 100% sure about old buildings and retro fits.

Coffin Dodger

As far as I understand it only newer business premises need to be disabled friendly, there is no need to retro fit.

However as an employer you must not be seen to be discriminating against disabled people. Therefore if you were to advertise a job that either an able bodied or disabled person could do equally well then there is nothing to stop someone who is disabled applying for it. You must treat them equally. If they got the job then you would have to have a lift, toilet facilities, etc. etc.

milf hunter

http://www.canterbury.gov.uk/assets/...ent-m-2004.pdf

this link is for document m which came in in oct 04 this is the law on dda

read page 54 on and it will answer all your questions

oobster

Many thanks for that milf hunter - much appreciated