Considering Least Restrictive Access

This post is greater than 6 months old - links may be broken or out of date. Proceed with caution!

By Craig Grimes, Managing Director

Experience Community is a not-for-profit organisation that was established in 2011 in response to a personal frustration. After living and working abroad for several years I returned to Yorkshire where I’d grown up. When I was a kid, I’d spent many a day in the Yorkshire Dales walking with my family, but as a disabled adult who uses a wheelchair, this was no longer possible for me and the countryside felt closed off, only accessible to my bipedal kin. The problem wasn’t just the lack of access for mobility aid users but also a lack of information.

Experience Community set out to solve some of these issues and now helps disabled people access the outdoors through inclusive walking, cycling, conservation and arts activities. We make films about routes so that disabled people can make informed choices about whether it might be suitable for them. Phototrails.org combines online mapping, geotagged photos of facilities and barriers and our unique route indicator system to give an overall picture of what disabled access is like.

We also provide access consultancy advice and training to a wide range of organisations and we have worked with National Park Authorities, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, local authorities, statutory bodies such as Natural Resources Wales and national charities such as the RSPB and National Trust.

Over the years we’ve learnt that sometimes land managers think that providing access for disabled people relies on large pots of grant funding to resurface footpaths with tarmac, which can be viewed as sanitising our green spaces and landscapes. While in some cases this might be the appropriate option, such as in urban parks, there are many ways in which we can provide better access for disabled people by small tweaks to infrastructure.

The concept of ‘Least Restrictive Access’ has been around for a while now and I first came across it in the document ‘By All Reasonable Means: Inclusive access to the outdoors for disabled people’ (2005, Countryside Agency1), which states:

The Framework for Action in this guide is based on the principle of Least Restrictive Access (LRA). This requires that all work, whether planned improvement or ad hoc maintenance, must meet the highest possible access standards for that piece of work.

Where the highest access standards cannot be achieved – for example, because of insufficient funds, lack of consent by a landowner or practical difficulties – there should always be a clearly reasoned and documented justification for the decision to use a lower standard.

LRA is an approach that helps raise the overall standard of access
of a site, route or facility over a period of time. (p.11)

The way this is phrased all sounds rather intimidating but Least Restrictive Access is a great way of considering how to improve access to the countryside for disabled people gradually. Rather than look at Least Restrictive Access from the angle of: ‘can the highest access standards be met and if not, why not?’, we can also look at it from the opposite: ‘what can be done to improve the current access and how can we strive to make it better?’

It’s about removing or improving man-made obstacles and barriers such as when replacing a 2 foot wide gate at the end of its lifespan, can it be replaced with a wider gate to enable users of off-road mobility equipment to get through it. Could a one-way opening stock gate be replaced with a two-way bridle gate? Is the gate still necessary or could a gap be left instead, thus removing the barrier completely?

Of course, when thinking about changing infrastructure, other considerations need to be taken into account such as what is the land use, who are the other stakeholders and what might the environmental and landscape impact be?

Quite recently I gave a presentation at a Local Access Forum and I spoke about barriers being subjective in that cattle grids are difficult to cross in my everyday wheelchair, while being easier to cross in my Mountain Trike. A stakeholder accused me of wanting to remove all cattle grids from the countryside, which of course isn’t true, as I understand their requirement for livestock control, but it did highlight to me how sensitive these issues can be.

Heritage can also be a tricky subject to negotiate, there are many stone stiles in the UK and in some parts, such as the Yorkshire Dales, they’re an iconic part of the landscape. What are the solutions to providing Least Restrictive Access when removing or replacing a heritage barrier results in the loss of historic features that are part of an area’s identity? Each access issue needs to be examined in its own unique circumstance. Maybe an additional alternative access could be provided, maintaining our history while helping disabled people enjoy it in the present.

Paths for All have recently released an updated version of ‘Countryside for All’ that was published in 1997 and may be of interest to readers of this article. The new ‘Outdoor Accessibility Guidance’ is in their own words: “designed as a practical reference with techniques, tools and design details to help people meet, and where possible exceed, their legislative duties under the Equality Act 2010.”

For me, Least Restrictive Access isn’t an exact science, it’s a place-based exercise that requires the ambition to improve equality of access for disabled people while limiting the negative impacts on other stakeholders and the landscapes we all want to appreciate.
www.experiencecommunity.co.uk
info@experiencecommunity.co.uk

Twitter: @ExperienceCIC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ExperienceCommunityCIC
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ExperienceCIC

   
Footnotes:

1. The Countryside Agency was one of the Government Agencies that was amalgamated into Defra

More from Experience Community