Inclusive access to culture and arts – interview with Andrew Miller MBE

Andrew Miller MBE is the UK Arts Access Champion supporting the delivery of All In – the national arts access scheme for disabled audiences, for which Calvium is a part of the delivery team.

Beginning his career at Channel 4 in the 1980s, Andrew was one of the first disabled presenters on British TV and is now a leading disability advocate, with particular experience of the arts, film and TV sectors. Over a long career, he has produced television series, run arts venues and been a cultural policy maker.

Alongside his role on the National Council of Arts Council England where he chairs the Disability Advisory Committee, Andrew chairs the Council of the new Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, and is a trustee of the Royal Shakespeare Company and BAFTA – where he chairs Young BAFTA. He also co-founded the UK Disability Arts Alliance #WeShallNotBeRemoved in 2020.

In this interview, Andrew discusses the barriers disabled people face when accessing arts and culture, how All In is seeking to address those and the socioeconomic benefits of greater inclusivity.

Please could you paint a picture of the ways in which access issues are a problem for disabled people when accessing arts and culture?

Due to the loose nature of the Equalities Legislation, access to culture in the UK has developed in a piecemeal and rather random way. There are pockets of fabulous practice around the country in terms of the access journey – which starts with booking tickets, moves into attendance and ends in the experience of the event – but for disabled people there is very little consistency. 

Good practice, where it exists, has not been shared out well; very often, disabled people experience discrimination and poor service, and each venue interprets their equality duty differently. They’ve received differing advice from access advisors so the quality of access varies hugely from venue to venue. Most venues run their own access schemes for audiences, which you have to join just to be able to book tickets. And every time you do that, you have to provide proof of disability, so for many of us that means providing proof over and over again. 

We have this weird situation where box office staff around the country are checking disabled people’s rights to benefits, and that’s not their job. I’ve often been quoted as saying it’s a bit like the wild west out there for disabled audiences, and whilst there are signs of improvement, largely it still is.

You helped launch Welsh access scheme Hynt. What have been some of the social, economic and cultural benefits of the scheme?

I first became convinced about the need for a national arts access scheme when I was a Council member of the Arts Council of Wales a decade ago. That’s when we launched Hynt – a Welsh word meaning ‘to bridge’ – a free membership scheme for disabled audiences in Wales, operating a consistent approach to ticket booking across 41 different cultural venues.

Users only have to sign up once to be able to book at any of these venues, it offers free companion seats as standard and a basic training programme to member venues to improve their access.

Hynt released its first impact report last year, revealing the significant social impact it is having on the lives of disabled people in Wales. For instance, it has provided almost 30,000 disabled people with better access to culture in Wales; 76% said it improved their access to culture, 73% said it improved their quality of life, 59% reported improved self confidence, and 81% said Hynt increases their social interactions.

There are cold hard economic benefits as well. The scheme generated an additional 144,000 attendances at cultural venues over the last decade, and for every complimentary ticket issued to card holders, member venues generated an average of about £23 in secondary revenue from drinks and programmes. This is important information we’ve highlighted to the sector.

Can you give some examples of good accessibility practice?

Soho Place is a new venue in London that opened after the pandemic. It is the first fully accessible theatre in the West End that offers disabled audiences not only a trust-based access scheme, but a range of seating options as well as performance space designed to be accessible for disabled artists. They also have an inclusive casting policy and staged the West End’s first disabled themed musical, the Olivier Award winning ‘The Little Big Things’.

I find it really encouraging that Soho Place exists in the fully commercial sector. Whilst there’s been long-standing good practice in the subsidised sector, in places like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, it’s great to see that positive ethos spreading. I think everyone now understands that good access enriches culture for everyone.

In your experience, what barriers remain in the booking process, limiting access to culture and the arts?

One of my principal drivers for advocating this national scheme was the lack of any consistent approach for online wheelchair bookings which often require dependency on access booking lines. As I’ve experienced through a lifetime of cultural event attendance, this lack of consistency and standards often makes engagement with our sector unnecessarily difficult for disabled customers.

In some theatres, I’ve barely been able to view the stage whilst being charged top dollar for the privilege. In others, I’ve discovered disabled toilets unable to accommodate a standard wheelchair, let alone changing place toilets. And recently, I spent three hours trying to book a London theatre ticket – half an hour on an unanswered call, joining two separate membership schemes and not being able to complete the purchase until a week later.

If I wasn’t disabled and didn’t need specific seating, I could have completed that transaction within five minutes online. Our aim is to showcase good practice and make sure it becomes a standard.

How will the All In Digital Membership System (DMS) reduce these barriers further and support venues?

For disabled audiences, the DMS will be the engine of that transformation. It will act as a passport to book suitable access tickets, whatever their access requirements, at multiple venues with ease – without inputting personal information over and over again. I hope it also raises the standards of what we as disabled people can expect and enhances our experience of culture.

For venues, it will provide additional confidence to support the disabled population across the UK – a large proportion of whom we know do not engage in culture due to existing barriers. Despite all the successes of Hynt, it has only reached about 5% of the Welsh disabled population, so imagine that level of penetration UK-wide, where the disabled population is around 16 million. A substantial number of these disabled individuals will be new audiences, so it’s a potentially very significant new market for venues.

In this context, All In could become a really vital audience development tool for the sector, which is one of the key drivers for us.

Your work advocating for increased accessibility has had real impact and made positive change happen. How will the All In programme deliver improved experiences for individuals and the sector?

All In essentially has three aims: to remove barriers for disabled audiences and improve our experience of culture; to standardise access across the sector and grow disabled audiences; and for the National Arts funders that are supporting it, it’s about the access transformation of the sector that aligns very closely with inclusive national strategies like Arts Council England’s Let’s Create.

All In will be free for all people with access requirements, and will be paid for by a subscription from venue members. It will introduce the UK and Ireland’s first accessibility standards for creativity and culture, which are currently being designed by leading access experts Attitude Is Everything. All In will also offer subscribed organisations guidance and skills development to improve their quality of access. 

It’s also really important to us that from the very beginning, this project has been led by disabled people – including the delivery team at Arts Council England, our advisory group and all our suppliers – so All In users can draw reassurance that we utilise our own lived experience, and the sector can also feel assured that we are of this industry. We understand the arts.

In the many circles you move in, from national policy to individual experiences, how have you found the reaction to All In, and the development of the DMS?

Touch wood, it’s been universally positive so far and we have been able to bring the sector with us. Unusually for a product of the Arts Council, All In will be a campaigning brand, not only celebrating and highlighting great existing access practice, but also pushing the sector to raise its game. We won’t be afraid to address controversy.

For example, I published an article last year in The Stage in support of theatre content warnings, which we see as essential access provision, and that’s where having a disabled-led delivery team at the Arts Council is really important. 

We want to be an ally of the sector, which means both giving arts professionals increased confidence when interacting with their disabled customers, and giving disabled audiences increased agency in their engagement with cultural providers.

Our focus over the last couple of years has been on the sector, but that will shift later this year when All In becomes a more public focused programme and we hope, starts to support large numbers of disabled audiences.

Since your role of Director of Programming at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff over a decade ago, how has the culture of arts organisations changed regarding accessibility? What progress has been made, on stage and off, and what work is still to come?

Ultimately, the barriers for disabled creatives are the same as those facing all disabled people – that comes down to attitudes and access. When I began my career at Channel Four in the 1980s, there was virtually no positive representation of disability anywhere, and little value placed on disabled people’s creativity. 

Together with many other disabled creatives of my generation, I set out on a path to democratise culture to a point where our participation in it would no longer be something that was remarkable. And whilst that’s been a complex and often difficult journey, we have come a very long way since…

Last year’s Olivier Awards, for example, saw not one, but two visibly disabled wheelchair-using artists from two different shows ascend the ramp to collect their Awards at the Royal Albert Hall. Such recognition goes way beyond any inclusive box ticking exercise, and really would have been beyond my wildest dreams of inclusion back in the 1980s.

Today’s artists are taking it to the next level by making disabled performers and disabled stories central to our national culture and, of course, the first step for any artist is to be able to experience others’ work. 

By improving the sector’s approach to access, All In will, in time, be a critical element of that talent pipeline. So hopefully we help support and create a virtuous circle.

Given the above – why has it taken so long for a UK and Ireland-wide access scheme to happen? Why didn’t it happen a decade ago, for instance, or before then?

Hynt in Wales was launched a decade ago and remains a pioneering example of access transformation from Arts Council of Wales. Of course, it was long overdue in the wider UK and Ireland landscape, but I do believe everything is a product of its own time and environment. I’m surprised that a project of the scale and scope of All In hasn’t happened before globally, but I think it’s also indicative of the improved level of influence we as disabled people now have that didn’t exist a decade ago.

My work is all about ensuring disabled people don’t have to face the same career limiting discrimination as previous generations, and whilst much remains to be fixed – especially buildings and creative funding is not yet fully representative – the progress we’re witnessing convinces me there’s probably never been a better time to be disabled and involved in the UK’s Creative Industries. 

Whether that is as an artist, employee or audience member, those attitudinal and access barriers are falling all around us and I believe All In will raise that bar even further. So we’re really in exciting times.

Thank you Andrew for sharing your insights, ideas and vision with us!