The main pieces of legislation relevant to disabled people included the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, which was supposed to ensure reasonable access to paid employment for disabled people and which failed lamentably, largely because successive governments refused to enforce it. Then there was the Education Act (1944), which suggested that the most acceptable place to educate disabled children was in ordinary schools, but which in reality became the vehicle for establishing a massive range of segregated special schools whose power and influence

remains largely unchallenged today. Next there was the National Health Services Act (1948), which, although establishing an impressive range of acute care hospitals, largely confined disabled people to geriatric wards. This was so at least until the 1960s, when a number of young chronic sick units were established, usually in the grounds of local hospitals. Finally there was the National Assistance Act (1948), which gave local authorities the power to provide either community-based or residential services for disabled people. In reality they provided few of the former and were often only too happy to purchase the latter from the old established charities or the newly emerging organisations, such as the Cheshire Foundation and the Spastics Society.