Jane Campbell, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton
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Jane Susan Campbell, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, DBE, is a Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). She also serves as Chair of the Disability Committee which will lead on the EHRC Disability Programme. She was the former Chair of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE). She was Commissioner of the Disability Rights Commission until it was wound up in October 2007.
In 1996 she co-founded and directed the National Centre for Independent Living (NCIL) where she worked for six years before being appointed by the Minister for Social Care to chair SCIE. She is an active leader in the social care field and a campaigner and adviser for disability reforms.
She was born with spinal muscular atrophy. She cannot lift her head from the pillow unaided and needs a ventilator to help her breathe at night. She uses a powered wheelchair and has a computer on which she types with one finger.
As chair at the British Council of Disabled People and co-director at NCIL, Campbell saw these organisations through pioneering work in the field of independent living, civil rights, peer counselling and equal opportunities. In 1996 she co-authored a book called Disability Politics and was created a Dame in the Queen's 2001 birthday honours.
In 2003, Campbell was awarded an honorary doctorate in law from Bristol University and another in social sciences from Sheffield Hallam University. Currently, she is exploring the notion of a human rights perspective of social care.
In February 2007, it was announced by the House of Lords Appointments Commission that she would be made a life peer and will sit as a Crossbencher. Her peerage was gazetted as Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, of Surbiton in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, on 30 March 2007.
