News

Nick Danagher CV 

EMPLOYMENT

• March 2005-present: National Centre for Independent Living executive director.
• 1999-2005: Surrey Independent Living Council chief executive.
• 1996-9: Surrey Council personal assistance scheme development worker.
• 1995-6: Independent Living Alternatives young persons' forum development worker.
• 1994-5: Greenwich Association of Disabled People personal assistance adviser.

Voluntary Roles

• 2002-5: Co-chair of NCIL.
• 1998-2002: Co-chair and chair of British Council of Disabled People independent living subcommittee.

If Nick Danagher had had his way he would be presenting the evening news instead of Huw Edwards or Trevor McDonald. After completing a degree in English and media studies at the University of Sussex in 1991 he applied, unsuccessfully, for jobs with the BBC and ITV. The media's loss ultimately proved to be the disability movement's gain as last month he was appointed executive director of campaigning charity the National Council for Independent Living (NCIL).

NCIL's offices are based in Vauxhall, south London. It shares the building with the UK Coalition of People Living with HIV and Aids. Danagher's first month in post has been pretty hectic: he has already met community care minister Stephen Ladyman and minister for disabled people Maria Eagle and is working with the Association of Directors of Social Services on a protocol for commissioning direct payment support services.

"There is a lot happening at the moment and NCIL's influence is growing. The number of people who want to work and talk with us seems to be mushrooming daily," he says.

Over the coming 12 months Danagher aims to ensure the NCIL's foundations are stable for the future. This is partly because its core funding, a £280,000 section 64 grant - given to voluntary organisations supporting the Department of Health's policy priorities - ends in April 2006. NCIL's work supporting the network of centres for independent living (CILs) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland places it firmly in this category. NCIL also receives funding from Comic Relief and generates income by providing a training consultancy and publications.

Danagher became an activist as a student challenging the exclusion of disabled people. Now disability is set to enjoy a higher profile, not least because in February the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit published a report outlining the long-term strategy for improving the lives of disabled people.1 The impetus behind this, believes Danagher, is that the government realised disabled people's situation hadn't improved in the age of opportunity that Tony Blair promised.

One of the strategy's major pledges is that by 2025 all disabled people in the UK should have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life and be respected and included as equal members of society. Is such a notion achievable in 20 years? Smiling, Danagher says: "It is, but it would take a lot of concerted effort across the whole of society."

He argues that any such "revolution" would have to be a revolution for everyone and not just for disabled people. "It would involve every non-disabled person thinking about their attitude to impairment, trying to get people to rid themselves of the fear of that and accepting that impairment is an everyday part of life."

While two decades may sound like a long time to some, it is important to have a realistic deadline. One of the criticisms of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, says Danagher, is that it gave transport "ludicrously long timescales" to adapt its rolling stock. "It's given them carte blanche to forget about it for 15 years."

But there is a far more pressing deadline in the strategy that calls for each council to have a user-led organisation modelled on CILs by 2010. Danagher says there are only about 30 in the UK that are CILs in the purest sense, and creating one in each of the remaining 130 local authorities in five years will be a challenge.
He wants NCIL to have a lot of influence over local authorities' criteria for what constitutes a centre to ensure they will not be diluted by a sudden roll out of new CILs.

"It is important that new CILs adopt the same working principles and are controlled by disabled people at membership and governance level. And their constitution must say they are founded on independent living philosophy."

The strategy proposes amalgamating funding streams into an individual budget, which disabled people can decide how to spend. But how will they work? Danagher smiles and says: "I don't think the government has a clear idea of what individualised budgets are yet. That's good because they need us to work it out for them."
And NCIL is identifying sites across England to run six pilots over the next three years. Danagher emphasises that the service users who take part in the pilots should be those who already assess their own needs.

Although NCIL supports the concept of individualised budgets in principle, it does not want to see them completely replace direct payments. "We need to guard against diluting the transformational potential of direct payments because experience shows that practitioners tend to go for the easier, less risky, less empowering option for their clients if given the choice."

This is partly because of local authorities' risk averse culture, where they are not necessarily worried about the risk to the individual so much as that to the organisation, he says.

"Assumptions get made about people's ability to manage. One of the main reasons why direct payments have been obstructed is social services' fundamental lack of faith in disabled people's ability to manage their own support."

He adds that individualised budgets are about providing more accountability and transparency to users about how their budgets are spent. Much to Danagher's concern, there is still uncertainty as to whether the new funding mechanism could be used to purchase residential care places. Direct payments cannot be used for this. "Direct payments started off as a means of getting out of residential care so it seems a bit regressive to go back to that."

Once parliament resumes after the election one private member's bill that Danagher would be happy to fall by the wayside is Lord Joffe's on assisted dying for the terminally ill.

He sees its proposals to legalise voluntary euthanasia as "the thin end of the wedge", describing the recent death of Terri Schiavo in the US as the murder of a disabled person. "It was only legalised because it was a disabled person. She wasn't even in a coma, she was conscious."

He highlights the extra time limits for abortion of a disabled foetus: "How can you say that society wants to give disabled people equality and equal citizenship on the one hand when it is still possible to end disabled people's lives at the beginning and the end on different terms to non-disabled people?"

But there is a difference between assisted dying and euthanasia, and Danagher has mixed views on the bill's proposals for the former. "It's a personal assistance issue and I support disabled people's rights to do anything so I guess I should support this. It is a difficult thing to ask somebody to do, but if you can find someone to kill you it is quite a specific advert in the paper.

"That aside, if you have a right to personal assistance, you should have the right to have personal assistance for assisted dying. But most disabled people who want to end their lives do so because they have not been given adequate support and equality of opportunity to lead their lives to the full."

1. Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People, Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, 2005