Vision
Our vision is transport justice for all disabled people.
Below we’ll explain what each part of that sentence means.
Transport
Our focus is transport within the UK – the ways in which we make trips from our place of residence for any purpose. This includes public transport (bus, train, tram, metro, and light rail), private transport (car, taxi, and Private Hire Vehicle), active travel (walking and wheeling, cycling, and micromobility), and door-to-door transport (community transport, school transport, and patient transport). It also includes all stages of a journey: finding information and planning a journey, purchasing a ticket, getting to a stop or station, boarding, and leaving a vehicle, the experience on route, the last mile, and making complaints.
Justice
Justice goes beyond access. It means dismantling oppressive systems and infrastructure, and re-building equitable systems in their place. It means Nothing About Us Without Us: where disabled people have meaningful involvement in the design, delivery, and evaluation of services, and where the expertise of our community is sought out, believed, and appropriately compensated.
Justice means meaningful change. It means our inclusion no longer being viewed as a nice-to-have, a feel-good gesture, or a way of demonstrating corporate social responsibility. Justice means inclusion by default, and without exceptions.
Transport justice, disability justice, and climate justice are intertwined. Our Accessible Transport Survey found 71% of disabled people in our community would like to use environmentally friendly modes of transport more, but are prevented from doing so by a lack of accessibility and availability. The future of transport must be designed for everyone, or disabled people will be left behind.
For All
We are proud to be part of the vast and diverse disabled community. In the UK, we are 14.6 million people spanning different cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and with different caring responsibilities. This means that no two disabled people will have the same experience; some of us have conflicting access requirements, some of us have differing views, even if we share the same impairment, and many of us are impacted by multiple systems of oppression. This is why we seek to embed a pan-impairment and intersectional approach in everything we do.
Disabled People
We want to see change for all disabled people across the UK. By disabled, we mean anyone who faces access barriers due to an impairment – including people who don’t use the word ‘disabled’ to describe themselves. This explicitly includes those of us who are Deaf, neurodivergent, chronically ill, have a mental health condition, have age-related impairments, and people with both visible and non-visible impairments.
We use the Social Model definition of Disability: the view that we are disabled by barriers that exist in the world, rather than our individual bodies or minds. Those of us living with impairments or illness are not inherently ‘disabled’ – this is something that is created through exclusion. In a truly accessible world where all barriers are removed, we would still experience the effects of our impairments (such as fatigue, muscle weakness, or blindness) – but living with these would not result in exclusion from society.
Mission
Our mission is to break down barriers and transform the transport system, so that all disabled people can make the journeys we want, with freedom, dignity, ease, and confidence. We do this in five areas:
- Justice for communities
- Justice in systems
- Justice in practice
- Justice in society
- Justice in our organisation
Values
We’ll make sure that everything we do is guided by these values.
We are bold
- We speak truth to power
- We challenge the way things have always been done
- We aren’t afraid to ask difficult questions
- We prioritise systems change over quick fixes
- We set ambitious goals
We are collaborative
- We are proud to be a membership organisation and members are at the heart of every part of our work: we are a movement
- We build partnerships in our community, across the sector, and more widely
- We take a pan-impairment approach and include everyone
- We are committed to co-production
We are experts
- We value lived and learned experience equally
- We use our expertise to drive positive change across the transport sector
- We work with integrity
- We are rigorous in our approach
- We prioritise learning and development
We are unapologetic
- We are proud to be a disabled-led organisation
- We prioritise inclusion and accessibility in everything we do
- We work with the resources we have as a small charity
- We ask others to respect and meet our access requirements
- We create change through many different means: whether we’re marching, writing letters, creating art, or expressing solidarity from our beds, we all have a role to play
Discover more about us
Impact
We are a small but mighty Disabled People’s Organisation and we are proud of the impact we have.
Meet the team
Meet our incredible team of staff members, consultants, and Board of Trustees.
History
Learn about the history of our movement, and the ground-breaking campaigners who got us where we are today.
Support us
We can't do this without your support. Take action, give what you can, or sign up as a member - and join our movement of disabled people fighting for a better future.