Fresh concerns have emerged about the government’s commitment to solving the accessible housing crisis after the chancellor announced a £39 billion investment in social and affordable homes, but ignored disabled people’s urgent needs.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves stressed in her spending review that these would be “homes built for working people”, in a statement that failed to mention disabled people.
The spending review document says the new funding will provide “the biggest boost to social and affordable housing investment in a generation”, with £39 billion for a successor to the Affordable Homes Programme over the 10 years from 2026-27 to 2035-36.
It also says: “A major shortage of housing is one of the country’s biggest blockers to growth, limiting people’s ability to access well-paid jobs and constraining the growth of the country’s most productive towns and cities.”
But there is no mention of what measures the government will take to ensure these homes will be accessible to disabled people, and whether a significant proportion will be built to be suitable for wheelchair-users.
Last July, in one of the Labour government’s first major announcements, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government failed to mention the accessible housing crisis in its consultation on reforms to England’s National Policy Planning Framework.
And Labour ministers – including housing secretary and deputy prime minister Angela Rayner – failed to make any commitment to toughening accessibility standards on new-build homes, despite announcing a string of new housing measures, at their annual party conference last September.
Labour promised Disability News Service at the conference that it would set out its policies on accessible housing “shortly”, but nearly nine months later it has failed to do so.
It is now nearly three years since a pledge by the last Conservative government – which was never fulfilled – to take action to address the shortage of accessible homes.
It had promised to consult on new rules that would have forced all new homes to be built to the M4(2)* standard of accessibility, except for cases where this was “impractical and unachievable”.
Mikey Erhardt, campaigns and policy officer for Disability Rights UK (DR UK), said: “The promise of a huge injection of cash is welcome, but without the government committing to improving the accessibility standards of new-build homes, there’s a real danger that disabled people won’t benefit.
“The promise to build new homes is not enough; it fails to tackle the here and now of cold, inaccessible and expensive homes.
“The spending review also made clear that the government will continue to force thousands of disabled people into the most dangerous of choices: heating or eating, paying rent with their social security payments and risking going without to keep a roof over their heads.”
Erhardt said the government had “no serious plans” to bring down the cost of “ever-spiralling rents”.
He said: “How much will local authorities have to fork out to private landlords to pay to house people in temporary accommodation, as a consequence of the government’s failure to build accessible homes?”
And he said DR UK continued to be shocked that, while “talking up its investment in housing”, the government was moving forward with cuts to the financial support that disabled people rely on.
These include government plans to cut the disability element of universal credit by almost £50 a week for new claimants and freeze it for current recipients, and increase thresholds for PIP eligibility, which he said will “undoubtedly drive disabled people into even deeper poverty and put us at risk of homelessness”.
Inclusion London welcomed the increased funding for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) but said it remained “deeply concerned that the programme does not go far enough to address the acute shortage of accessible, social rent housing in London and across the country”.
An Inclusion London spokesperson said: “The AHP does not only provide grant funding to support housing providers to build social rent homes but also other so-called ‘affordable’ tenures such as shared ownership housing which is not affordable for the majority of disabled Londoners.
“The government must significantly invest in building the social rent homes that Deaf and disabled people need.
“We are also concerned that the government has agreed to allow social housing rents to raise annually by one per cent above [inflation] for the next 10 years, doubling the amount announced last year.
“Disabled people are reliant on social rent due to the security and affordability this tenure provides.
“Increasing social rent in the same year the government is proposing devastating disability benefit cuts, will disproportionately impact disabled people and push many of us even further into poverty.”
She added: “Currently, one in five disabled people in social housing and one in three in private rented housing are living in inaccessible homes.
“The announcement today fails to address this.
“We once again call on the government to take national action and ensure that all new-build homes have to meet the M4(2) adaptable and accessible homes baseline standard, and that at least 10 per cent of all new-build homes have to meet the wheelchair-user standard M4(3).
“Without doing so, any large-scale house building programme will fail to meet current and future housing requirements and will build inaccessibility into England’s housing stock.”
The Treasury had failed to comment by noon today (Thursday) on why there was no mention of the accessible housing crisis in the spending review statement and document.
*Homes built to the M4(2) standard have 16 accessible or adaptable features, similar to the Lifetime Homes standard developed in the early 1990s to make homes more easily adaptable for lifetime use, while M4(3) homes are those that are supposed to be fully wheelchair-accessible
Picture: A Wyatt Homes property in Dorset
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