‘The abuse of disabled parking spaces is rife’
After another travelling nightmare, Frank Gardner tells Guy Kelly why change for disabled people is desperately needed
Over the course of his almost 25-year career as a journalist and broadcaster, plus a few more as an intrepid amateur adventurer, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner has visited 106 countries and counting. It’s a passion that’s seen him squint through desert winds in Afghanistan, risk frostbite in the Arctic, sleep under rainforest canopies in Papua New Guinea, and dodge deadly snakes in Panama.
So, when it comes to travel, he says: “I’m used to taking the rough with the smooth.” Recently, though, his patience ran out – and he wasn’t even on foreign soil. Paralysed from the waist down after he was shot six times by a gang of al-qaeda sympathisers in Saudi Arabia in 2004 (his friend, Simon Cumbers, died in the same attack), last month Gardner was left on an empty plane at Heathrow Airport after landing from Ethiopia, and forced to wait for 100 minutes while staff “located” his wheelchair.
“I’ve got to say, I lost my rag and gave the ground staff a real b---------,” he says, when we meet over a mint tea at Broadcasting House in London. In his exact, officer-like BBC tones, hearing him say the B-word is odd, and the idea of him delivering one terrifying. “I said: ‘Look, it’s now 80 minutes’, then it was 90 minutes, then 95 minutes. It wasn’t their fault and the Ethiopian crew were as kind as they could be, but I had to raise my voice because it was unacceptable.”
In the moment, Gardner vented his anger in a series of furious tweets, shared thousands of times. “I am so utterly sick of @Heathrowairport ground staff ‘losing’ my wheelchair. When is UK’S premier airport going to stop treating disabled passengers this way?” he wrote to 82,000 followers, many of whom responded with similar horror stories. It was the “third or fourth” time he has posted complaints about disability access on planes at UK airports: “Believe me, I’m as bored of writing this as you are of reading it.”
The 56-year-old’s ordeal forced Heathrow to publicly apologise, initially in a fairly abject statement (they were sorry “if ” the service “fell short” of their supposedly high standards), then via the airport’s CEO, John Holland-kaye, who met with Gardner and introduced him to the Heathrow Access Advisory Group, a panel of seven people with first-hand experience of disabilities, to share his thoughts on what needs to be done. And, it seems, something finally is.
First, Heathrow announced that, from this summer, they will make it policy for wheelchairs to be taken to the door of planes. Secondly, this week the Department for Transport said it will be considering a raft of measures to make flying less miserable for people of reduced mobility (PRM).
“I don’t know if my tweets have set this off, but if the net result is that disabled travellers get a better deal, I’m delighted to have been a nuisance.”
Last year, Sophia Warner, a Paralympian with cerebral palsy, was asked to prove her disability by airport staff who, according to Warner, said: “You look completely normal. Why do you need help?”
There are a number of measures Gardner would like to see. At the moment wheelchair-users are almost always forced to put their chairs in the hold. And every time it goes in, it risks being misshapen or crushed. In 2010, Malaysian Airlines wrote off a £4,000 chair he’d saved for several years for. It was insured, but he only received £100 compensation. “This stuff isn’t baggage, it’s our legs,” he says. “I would like to see stiff penalties imposed for damage to chairs. A buckled wheel is the equivalent of somebody taking an iron bar to your limbs. I would advise every PRM to refuse to get off the plane without your own wheelchair.”
Once on the plane, via an airport wheelchair, short-haul flights do not tend to carry on-board “aisle chairs” for disabled passengers to move around.
“That means you don’t go to the loo on a plane in Europe. So you either starve yourself, which is what I do, or risk having an accident. It’s demeaning and very uncomfortable. Going to the loo is a basic human right. Why have millions of people got to be denied that?” he says. “If you can get a pram into an overhead locker, you can get a folding aisle chair into one.”
Things are rarely better long-haul, where the problem of lifts not turning up to lower PRM down when steps are needed is one of many issues.
Six years ago, Kenya Airways told Gardner he ought to catheterise himself before flying. Only when he complained and attracted British media attention did they change their policy.
If there is an aisle chair, on the other hand, he is “strapped in like Hannibal Lecter, and treated like an immobile lump of meat.
I have full control of my upper body and worked hard to bring back my core body strength, so I don’t like being grabbed. It’s dehumanising.”
In June, it will have been 14 years since he and Cumbers were attacked in Riyadh. Of the six shots fired at Gardner, four were at point-blank range. The bullets smashed into his spinal nerves, pelvis and abdomen. It took seven months and 14 operations before he was discharged. The first trip abroad as a wheelchair user, in April 2005, was to continue his recovery in Thailand.
“It was depressing. I wasn’t even high enough to hand my passport to the bloke at the desk in Bangkok. I saw adverts for jungle treks I wanted to go on, then realised I no longer could,” he says, before perking up. “But you know what? You overcome, you adapt, you improvise.”
Does he give the attack much thought these days? “No, only when I’m asked about it. Life moves on.” Life moves on, but not without change. When he left hospital, his occupational therapist took one look at his Edwardian terrace house in south London (“all vertical, all stairs”) and told him it won’t work. So the Gardner family – Amanda, his wife, and their two daughters – moved into an apartment with lifts and a couple of alterations to make wheelchair access easier. He learnt to drive without pedals in a day, and returned to work as soon as he could. “The BBC have been very good. There are some stories I’ve been unable to do, and that has been frustrating. Like the Arab Spring. As somebody who speaks Arabic and lived in Egypt, to miss out on being in Tahrir Square was hard, but there are riots, quick-moving crowds, and I accept that.”
Has he seen progress when it comes to disability access over the past 14 years? In a word, no. “There was a blip for the 2012 Paralympics, but I’m not sure the appreciation of disabled athletes has translated. I’m sure there have been improvements, but have I seen any? Not really. “I drive every day in London, and in 14 years of driving with a wheelchair, I have not once seen anybody come out of a disabled parking spot who visibly needs it. I accept there are hidden disabilities, but the abuse of blue badge parking is rife.” When it comes to travel, presumably intelligent airports, airlines and staff will spot Gardner coming next time. “Oh, I hope not. I absolutely do not want any special treatment over what all disabled people get.
If I get good treatment, I want it across the board. They all need to raise their game.”
‘I have not once seen anybody come out of a disabled parking spot who visibly needs it’