David Rose, spokesperson for the Magistrates’ Association and chair of the Magistrates with Disabilities Network, has been a magistrate for 29 years. He wears a prosthetic leg to court.
I’m an above-knee amputee, I suffered a severe trauma limb loss in 1979 when I was 23 years of age. I have a lot of experience of being excluded from numerous courtrooms due to wholly inadequate access.
The building that I was originally appointed to was an old medieval building in Maldon, Essex, and it wasn’t accessible. We then merged with another small [magistrates] bench in Witham. I couldn’t get up three flights of stairs to the upper floor where there are two courts so I used to only sit in hearings on the ground floor.
A few years later, as the court estate started to shrink, we were merged with Chelmsford and that’s where things got really challenging. Then the magistrates court sat in the Shire Hall, which I think I’m right in saying was built in 1791. It’s a marvellous building but not fit for purpose as a magistrates court, it had these crazy stairs. The thing that really got me was that the assembly room where everyone would meet to start the day and prepare was on the top floor. I had to sit [alone] in the retiring room [on the ground floor].
I just became Billy No-Mates. That’s when I really considered chucking it in, I was being excluded. My wife actually said: “Why are you persevering with this?” Something just motivated me to stick with it and try to change what I thought was wrong and that’s motivated me to this day.
A report by the Law Society on court access a few years ago identified one of the courts where I sit, Colchester, as the best court in the country for access. It’s qualified by the fact that it was the newest court.
We have seen progress but the thing that strikes me is when you achieve good levels of access of certain parts of the court state, if anything, it creates a stark contrast with other buildings.
The challenges that I had to overcome 20-odd years ago are live and real today for colleagues in other parts of the country.
