Unfortunately Kemi Badenoch has made the single sex toilet situation worse in many cases, though still proclaiming she made it better. She does not understand or is ignoring the consequences of the toilet designs her department oversaw during the toilet consultations that led to ‘Document T’ for public/office toilets. The ARUP document her ‘Levelling Up’ department commissioned to look at toilet design is a disgrace for safeguarding.
There is a tweet just before the general election that Kemi Badenoch posted of a thankyou card where a woman was thanking her and voting Conservative in the general election. The card from the woman discussed how she had been attacked in public toilets by two men in separate incidents - one of which had tried to bash the door down.
The new designs will make it worse. They rely much more on a perpetrator restraining themselves because a victim has less chance.
The new designs in Document T are more dangerous (than the traditional single sex toilets with gaps under and over the doors/partitions) as even the single sex ones can use the fully enclosed unisex design and are openable from the outside (even when ‘locked’) because of this enclosure. So there’s no need to bash the door down. And ‘perfect’ privacy so the perpetrator can hide in a next door cubicle beforehand, the woman occupant has no warning beforehand of the perpetrator letting themselves in and there is no worry of witnesses as they are private - a great incentive for crime.
Despite pointing out these flaws in the consultation process, evidence of real life stories and data, writing to Kemi Badenoch, other MPs and departments, the designs are unchanged. We then have the Department of Education stipulating this enclosed toilet design for single sex toilets in secondary schools (Dec 2023). That document, under the conservatives, completely ignores safety and health in the toilet section - the words are not mentioned. This is in contrast to the rest of the document where the words safe and safety are mentioned as the priority to a school building/refurbishment programme.
So it’s all well and good saying you want single sex spaces and do two public consultations on toilets but you ignore the warnings to then come up with a ‘solution’ that is more dangerous for everyone (including those collapsing unseen inside the enclosed cubicles through medical conditions/illness/spiking/other drugs/smoke etc) then you are doing more harm than good. FWIW I know several people discussed problems, including a charity, but none of these responses appeared on the write up consultation analysis. Our responses were absolutely ignored - I know because I have the evidence of omission.
To Labour - it would be such an easy fix to save lives and prevent assaults and other crimes. Stipulate door gaps in single sex designs of public toilets and school toilets. Provide a degree of visibility at feet level at least so you can see if someone is in trouble. Safeguarding the vulnerable. If you are unsure, just look at the evidence of what happens in public toilets when you enclose them. It does not matter what ‘sign’ is on the door because criminals don’t take notice. And any medical event certainly doesn’t.