John Evans was a disabled person, who campaign from the 1970s for better social care to support disabled people’s independent living in the community.

Studying in the USA, aged 25, he broke his neck while exercising, resulting in permanent high-level paralysis. After five months in a local hospital he flew back to London from Los Angeles, after having got to know people at the Centre for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley, California.

Back in the UK he stayed at the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville hospital and then lived with two non-disabled friends in a cottage in the New Forest for eighteen months until 1978.

After living in the New Forest, Evans became a reluctant resident at the Le Court, Leonard Cheshire Home which he said he detested.

His campaigning for independent living was based on his experiences as a resident in this Home with its restrictive environment and lack of autonomy. With fellow residents he set up initiatives to support disabled people leaving institutional care to live independently with funded support for personal assistants (PAs). This was an important starting point in the independent living (IL) movement in the UK.

Evans held a leadership role in the Project 81 group, founded in 1979 initially of residents at Le Court wanted to escape institutional living. The project’s name was inspired by the United Nations’ International Year for Disabled People in 1981, and its members aimed to demonstrate that people with severe impairments could live independently with state financial support to pay for personal assistants.

Evans attended the first International Conference on Independent Living held in Munich, Germany, in 1982.

Evans left Le Court in December 1983 to move into his own maisonette in nearby Petersfield, Hampshire, with a support package paid by the local authority via Le Court.

In 1984 Evans and other disabled people, including its founder Simon Brisenden, helped establish the user-led Hampshire Centre for Independent Living (CIL), said to be the first of its kind in the UK, followed closely by Derbyshire CIL in 1985. This network soon extended to Nottingham, Bristol, Islington, Lambeth, Greenwich, and Lothian in Scotland.[8]

Evans was one of the organisers of the protest march of disabled people on 28 July 1988 which converged on the DHSS head office at the Elephant and Castle, London. This was to challenge the government cuts in a state disability benefit, and as a result of this campaign the government set up a new fund – the Independent Living Fund (ILF) In 2012-2013 he campaigned to stop the ILF being abolished, saying “Over the years we have seen independent living transform the lives of so many disabled people from passive recipients to active citizens and employers.”

Evans was on the Board of Directors of both the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL), and the European Disability Forum (EDF) from 1996 until 2014. He was one of the founding members of the European Coalition of Community Living (ECCL).

In 1989 Evans chaired the Independent Living Committee of the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP) and helped start a campaign for ‘direct payments.’ These payments would be from councils with a social services department and given directly to disabled people to employ their personal assistants, for home equipment and similar costs.

Evans helped BCODP commission the first researched publication on direct payments in the UK, called “Cashing In on Independence,” a major piece of research. It demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of independent living compared to institutional care, leading to Parliament passing the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996. Evans helped BCODP develop the committee that become known as the National Centre for Independent Living (NCIL) with Jane Campbell and Frances Hasler as its first co-directors in 1997.

In 2023 he said there was an “already dwindling PA market following Brexit, the pandemic and now the rise in the cost of living … It has never been more difficult finding new staff in my experience of 40 years of employing my own PAs … This puts an enormous burden on us as well as an increase in stress because of the worries about remaining living independently that could result in the loss of our freedom.”