Supermarket shoppers commit disability crime

A survey has revealed that more than one in five parking bays for disabled customers at the UK's supermarkets are being taken by non-disabled drivers.

The Baywatch campaign assessed the 10,000 plus parking slots earmarked for disabled drivers and found that over 2,000 were occupied by cars not displaying a blue badge.

Disabled customers will have had to leave without managing to do their shopping at more than a third of supermarkets as no accessible bays were left available due to other selfish shoppers.

Just one in four supermarkets said they had never seen any abuse of disabled bays in their car parks. Studying the UK's largest four supermarket chains, customers at Asda and Tesco were the worst offenders, with 23 per cent of disabled parking spaces being abused by able-bodied drivers, which was a two per cent increase on 2005's results.

Sainsburys abuse statistics stayed at 18 per cent, while for the second survey running Morrison's had drastically reduced disabled bay abuse.

After the chain managed to reduce abuse of disabled bays by seven per cent cut in 2005, this year less than 13 per cent of bays were subject to abuse.

Sir Bert Massie, chairman of the Disability Rights Commission, commented: "Supermarkets need to understand that their duties under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) are considerably more than just painting some lines and a wheelchair symbol in the car park.

"Supermarkets are legally bound to make their services accessible. If they don't take steps to stop non-disabled people parking in these spaces they could be breaking the law."

Ian Macrae, editor of Disability Now, added: "The continuing failure of supermarkets to tackle abuse of blue badge bays is an on-going disgrace. I'm amazed that people like the CEOs of Tesco and Asda aren't squirming with embarrassment and thinking about whether this represents a failure on their part to meet their responsibilities both to disabled customers and under the DDA."


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