Up to 885,000 People Deprived of Accessible Home Opportunity Due to Government Delay

The analysis was done by the Housing Made for Everyone (HoME) coalition, a group that Disability Rights UK is part of, co-chaired by the Centre for Ageing Better and Habinteg.

As many as 885,000 more people could now be living in accessible and adaptable properties if legislation requiring higher minimum standards in new build homes had been delivered as promised, new analysis from the Centre for Ageing Better and Habinteg reveals.

Tuesday 29 July 2025 marks the three-year anniversary of a government announcement confirming plans to require all new homes to have entrance level step-free access and other accessibility features as a minimum requirement.  

The government’s decision came after a large-scale consultation and reflects the need for the country’s homes to be accessible and adaptable to support population ageing and growing numbers of older and Disabled people to live safely and independently at home. A second round of consultation that was planned to finalise the transition to the new regulations has never materialised.

In the three years since the announcement, Habinteg and Ageing Better analysis indicates that we have just 112,000* new accessible and adaptable homes - based on an industry average that only one in four new build homes have been built to this standard.

This means that the vast majority of homes built in this time, totalling more than 375,000, are not built to meet the needs of Disabled people or the changing needs of people throughout their lifetime.

Our new polling indicates high levels of public concern around how people would cope living in their own home if they developed a serious health issue or injury.

Two in three people (66%) think they would have problems moving around their current home and carrying out everyday tasks without major adaptations to their property if they developed a health issue or serious injury.

The previous government commented in their consultation response on the positive impact that raising the accessibility standards of new homes would have on housing health and welfare. They noted that it would ‘future proof’ new homes for successive generations, saving costs associated with moving or adapting homes. 

More than three in four people (77%) think all new homes should be built to a standard that allows people to live independently as they age or if they become disabled.

As a member of the Housing Made for Everyone (HoME) coalition, Disability Rights UK calls on the government to use the opportunity provided by the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to raise the default standard to the M4(2) standard of accessibility and adaptation.

Mikey Erhardt, DR UK's Housing Policy Lead, said:

“The Labour Government has essentially made the building of 1.5 million new homes its one and only flagship housing policy. The Labour government described its first attempts at fixing our broken housing system by making changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) as "radical" and "decisive". Yet despite calls from Disabled people’s organisations to confirm that these homes should be built to improved accessibility standards, the Government has consistently refused to give this commitment. It still relies essentially on the goodwill of developers to create the homes we all know we need.

Little progress has been made to improving the realities of the housing crisis for Disabled people. Just 9% of homes have the most basic levels of accessibility. The consultation on improving accessibility to new build homes closed in December 2020, with an announcement to improve standards in July 2022. Yet because of the appalling inaction of the previous and current Governments, the crisis of inaccessible homes has been allowed to worsen.

The Labour Government must break its silence on this critical issue and commit now to 100% of new build homes being built to improved accessibility standards and at least 10% to wheelchair user standards. These are small commitments in the grand scheme of things, but would go a long way to rebuilding trust that the government is listening to us.”