Commander's intent
CADRE UK is a national, evidence-led coalition examining how councils and other public bodies anticipate disabled people's requirements, make reasonable adjustments, and stop institutional decisions from creating or intensifying vulnerability.
What we are here to do, how we will do it, and what success looks like.
Establish a national, evidence-led coalition to examine and improve how councils and other public bodies anticipate disabled people’s requirements, discharge duties to make reasonable adjustments, identify foreseeable risks, and prevent institutional decisions or environments from creating or intensifying vulnerability.
Bring together disabled people, representative organisations, researchers and practitioners to document recurring mechanisms of harm; analyse their legal, administrative and organisational causes; and develop practical proposals for prevention, transparent decision-making and accountability. Individual experience is treated as a source of evidence and inquiry, assessed alongside legislation, policy, institutional records and comparative cases.
Public bodies recognise and discharge anticipatory duties as a routine part of governance and service design. Avoidable barriers are identified and removed before harm occurs; failures are recorded and addressed; and disabled people are not required to bear the continuing cost of pursuing change case by case.
The burden of preventing foreseeable disability-related harm belongs within public-body planning and governance. It should not rest on disabled people having to identify, explain and repeatedly contest avoidable barriers.
We will investigate whether, how and why public bodies fail to anticipate disabled people's needs, provide reasonable adjustments, or recognise foreseeable effects on health, wellbeing and financial security.
That includes circumstances where policies, procedures, physical or digital environments, service interfaces, procurement decisions or administrative practices create or compound barriers.
The project begins from a concern about systemic patterns of practice and institutional culture. It will test that concern through evidence and comparative analysis, rather than assume that every authority or service fails in the same way.
See the principal questionsThe research questions that frame every strand of evidence-gathering and analysis.
How are anticipatory duties understood, assigned and implemented within councils and other public bodies?
What organisational conditions contribute to failures of foresight, adjustment or risk recognition?
In what ways can public decisions, systems or environments create or intensify vulnerability?
What health, wellbeing, participation and financial consequences follow from these failures?
How are responsibility, remedy and accountability allocated when foreseeable harm occurs?
Which governance, service-design and scrutiny mechanisms can prevent recurrence?
The initial study focuses on local government while retaining a national remit across the United Kingdom, examining differences in law, policy and institutional arrangements between the four jurisdictions.
Where necessary, the project may examine interactions with other public services, regulators, contractors and providers whose decisions affect local authority access and outcomes.
A mixed-method, interdisciplinary approach that sets individual experience alongside law, policy and institutional records.
Findings distinguish between four kinds of claim. We identify the limits of the available evidence and avoid generalising beyond what the material supports.
Five deliverables, each building on the last, take the project from definition to recommendation.
Defining the project’s concepts, boundaries and research questions.
Of anticipatory duties, reasonable-adjustment practice and accountability routes.
For collecting and analysing lived-experience evidence safely and consistently.
An initial analysis of recurring institutional mechanisms that create or compound barriers.
Practical proposals for prevention, governance, remedy and public accountability.
CADRE UK is forming now. We want to hear from anyone with experience, expertise or records that can help show where foresight fails — and how it can be designed in.