When the Most Expensive Option Isn’t Always the Right Solution

What were the issues?

The owner of a local petrol station had been advised that in order to ‘comply’ with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) he would have to install a ramp in order to facilitate access to the shop area by wheelchair users.

Our solution:

Virosafe was asked to review the identified requirements and provide an estimate for installing the ramp.  Our first task was to undertake an accessibility audit to identify all the issues.  We found that if a ramp was to be installed, the owner of the filling station would have to rearrange the interior of his shop as there wasn’t enough room for a wheelchair to negotiate the fittings.  The owner would also have had to remove some of the fittings inside the shop.  Our alternative solution to avoid all of this work having to be undertaken and to avoid the loss of revenue to the business and service to the customers that would have occurred as a result of removing stock fittings, was to install a service call facility. This enabled wheelchair users to be able to press a button from outside the shop which would notify a member of staff that service was required.  The member of staff was then able to go outside to serve the customer.  We not only installed the service call facility but trained the staff in how to use it as well.

The outcome …

The filling station consulted with a regular customer who was a wheelchair user.  The customer was delighted with this solution and a service call facility was installed.  The cost of service call facility came to £650 fully fitted. Had the ramp been fitted, it would have cost somewhere in the region of £3,000 to £3,500.  There would have been other additional costs too including the loss of revenue from the stock fittings that would have had to have been removed and the loss to customers of the products that would no longer have been stocked in the shop.