We don’t just need funding for adaptations – we need policy to drive delivery of new accessible homes too | Latest news

By Christina McGill, Habinteg’s Director of Social Impact & External Affairs

This week we heard that the government has given a £50 million funding boost to the Disabled Facilities Grant to help more older and disabled people adapt their homes to live independently. This is very welcome and will be good news for the potential 5,000 households that will be able to live more easily at home as a result.

Adaptations funding for features such as stairlifts, ramps and accessible bathrooms will always be vital in a country with so much older housing stock. But what of new accessible housing? £50 million spent on new wheelchair accessible properties could provide around 2,500 homes; long term assets that will meet the needs of generations far into the future. Should government be ringfencing such funding too as part of its Social and Affordable Homes Programme?

Habinteg’s research has shown the considerable cost benefits of building accessible homes.

In our research, we looked at the payback of new wheelchair user homes over a ten-year period. Our report, Living not existing: The economic and social value of wheelchair user homes (commissioned from the London School of Economics (LSE)) calculated economic and social benefits of wheelchair accessible properties. It showed that a wheelchair user home occupied by a later years’ household provides benefits worth around £100,000 over a ten-year period. This compares to its ‘extra’ cost to build averaging at just £18,000.

For a working-age adult wheelchair user the 10-year benefit is valued at £94,000 with an average additional cost to build of £22,000. These value calculations combine reduced public expenditure with revenue generated when disabled people or their families can take up or increase paid work.

Yet affordable wheelchair user homes are in short supply. In 2020, we reported that 400,000 wheelchair users were living in unsuitable homes but just 4% (around 108,000) of new homes are planned to be built to wheelchair user standard over the next decade.

The Royal Borough of Greenwich recently reported that it hasreduced the number of households waiting for a wheelchair accessible council home from 256 to 147 over the past year. That’s a cut of 42%.

According to the council’s website, they achieved this by ensuring 10% of the 588 new social homes built in the borough over the past five years are wheelchair accessible. These homes are part of its Greenwich Builds programme, which plans to create 1,750 new council homes for local people.

The council says: “The council’s drive to build new accessible homes doesn’t just benefit tenants, it’s also more efficient than carrying out expensive adaptations to existing buildings to modify them for wheelchair use. Figures from other local authorities indicate that the saving could be as much as £1 million per 80 homes.”

Councillor Anthony Okereke, Leader of the Royal Borough of Greenwich said: “When we set up the 1,750 home Greenwich Builds programme, we made it our mission to reduce the unacceptably high number of people waiting for a place to live that was adapted for wheelchair users.”

The Greenwich example reveals further benefits. More wheelchair user homes have reduced pressure on the council’s housing waiting list and there’s the very immediate relief for households who may have been waiting for a long time.

In Greenwich, most of the reduction has been in the number of people waiting for a two-bedroom property, which is the most popular size of accessible new build council home. Households needing larger accessible homes, or who have specific housing needs, are still currently facing a longer wait. 

Habinteg has long argued that it’s more efficient in the long term to build purpose-built wheelchair standard and accessible properties, designed from the ground up with specific space standards and accessibility features integrated into the original structure. By contrast, adaptations to a typical older home are often constrained by the existing layout and structure.

With local government budget pressures high, it’s important to remember that accommodating disabled people in residential care or supporting with social care services in an inappropriate home not only denies people independence and stifles life chances but can be far more costly than building a new accessible home.

This is why A toolkit for local authorities in England: Planning accessible homes, developed by Habinteg with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, advises local councils take a strategic approach to planning new accessible homes, including wheelchair-accessible housing.  

Habinteg recommends that the government requires every local plan to identify a minimum requirement for new homes to meet M4(3) wheelchair user standards and sets 10% as the starting point where plans fail to do so. Greenwich’s success story shows the real-world impact this can have.

If the government wants to improve housing for disabled and older people it needs to provide better access to inclusive, fit for purpose properties. That needs more than just funding for adaptation of older homes, we need robust policies that drive delivery of new accessible and wheelchair standard properties too.