Building new accessible homes is a clear winner over home adaptations | Latest news

The £50m that’s been added to the government’s Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG) scheme aims to help more disabled people like me live safely and independently. I’m a wheelchair user and I live in a privately owned property, which I’ve adapted and without which I’d be socially isolated and have limited work capacity.

With the average DFG being around £10,000, the government’s one-off cash boost could help a further 5,000 households fund essential home adaptations, such as ramps or an accessible bathroom, which both feature in my home and make it safe and fully accessible to me.

England has the oldest housing stock in Europe, so home adaptations will always be vital. But what if that £50m was spent on accessible housing? Answer: it would help many more disabled people in the long term and save the public purse millions.

Habinteg’s Living not Existing report – carried out by the London School of Economics – found that within a 10-year period the benefits achieved for a wheelchair-user home, occupied by one or more working-age wheelchair users, would be £94,000, and for a disabled person of pensionable age would exceed £100,000. The calculations combine reduced public expenditure on health and welfare with tax on earnings when disabled people or their families can take up or increase paid work.

Inadequate planning for accessible homes

With such obvious benefits you might wonder why so few wheelchair-user homes are being built. In 2020, Habinteg reported that 400,000 wheelchair users were living in unsuitable homes, but according to its recent report, A forecast for accessible homes 2025, just 4% (around 108,000) of new homes are planned to be built to wheelchair-user standard over the next decade.

The lack of planning for wheelchair-user homes has real-life consequences for disabled people. It’s one of the reasons I joined Habinteg’s Insight Group, which campaigns for more accessible housing. When my partner and I were looking for a home, we looked at 18 different properties before we found one that met our criteria: a bungalow with space for adaptations.

Before I adapted my home, my in-home care service refused to lift my wheelchair over external thresholds and our bathroom shower tray due to it being a health and safety risk, so I couldn’t have a shower or go out without the assistance of my family.

This made personal care more difficult and had a detrimental impact on my career, as I had to change in-person appointments to online ones, which had financial consequences for the company I worked for.

The cost of adaptations

As my family and I were not eligible for the DFG, we paid for the adaptations ourselves, to the tune of around £24,000, by taking out a bank loan. Had we been able to buy a wheelchair-user home from the outset we could have avoided the stress and cost of major adaptations, as it would have met my access requirements as well as those of future generations of disabled households.

People I know have had to relocate miles away from their community and support network just to get a home that meets only some of their accessibility requirements. Can we justify doing this to disabled people?

The government’s revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) does nothing to improve the outlook for wheelchair users because it doesn’t require each local plan to set any target for M4(3) wheelchair-user homes. Instead, it leaves local authorities to decide on the proportion of accessible and adaptable homes (M4(2) in Building Regulations) and M4(3) homes to be built, with a minimum of 40% combined delivery.

According to Habinteg’s forecast, 103 out of 311 local plans have no requirement for wheelchair-user homes as it stands, and the new proposal does nothing to change this.

Ultimately, the absence of policy specifically on wheelchair-user homes in local plans risks a growing shortfall in such properties over time as demand increases.

Make all new homes accessible

This is why Habinteg is calling for the NPPF to stipulate that every local plan must identify a minimum requirement for new homes to meet wheelchair-user standards, with 10% as the starting point.

Such an approach has shown to be successful in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The borough has almost halved its waiting list for new wheelchair-user council homes by ensuring 10% of new social homes built over the past five years are wheelchair accessible.

The council says this doesn’t just benefit local tenants, it’s also more efficient than carrying out expensive adaptations to existing buildings to modify them for wheelchair use. Its website cites figures from other local authorities indicating that the savings could be as much as £1m per 80 homes.

It’s critical that national and local government appreciate these benefits. Without forward-thinking policies on wheelchair-user housing, we will cause ever more costly damage to the life chances and well-being of disabled people like me.

This article was originally published in Inside Housing on 12 February 2026.

Image: Luis Canto E Castro