Housing LIN supports Accessible Homes Week 2023

Every September, Habinteg hosts Accessible Homes Week to celebrate what an accessible home can do for a person's wellbeing, independence and overall quality of life. This year, Accessible Homes Week takes place from Monday 4 to Friday 8 September 2023.

To mark what is their eighth annual week, they commissioned the London School of Economics to undertake research to demonstrate the economic and social value of wheelchair user homes to society. The research report revealed that the additional cost of building a wheelchair user home – instead of an accessible & adaptable home - for a typical disabled adult of working age is around £22,000, with the potential ten-year financial and social benefit to the individual and the public purse being around £94,000.

Jeremy Porteus, founder and CEO, Housing LIN, said:

"This report provides useful findings on the state of wheelchair housing in the UK but, most importantly, offers a set of essential and achievable policy and practical recommendations to ensure more accessible homes are now built, founded on the lived experiences of people living with disabilities."

The Housing LIN is proud to work alongside Habinteg as a founding member of the Housing Made for Everyone (HoME) Coalition. 

What can we do to provide more wheelchair-accessible homes? (opens new window)

In this blog published by Habinteg, Charlotte Watson, Senior Policy Adviser at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), says Accessible Homes Week is a great opportunity to consider where we are, and the next steps needed, in our journey towards creating homes that cater to everyone's needs – including ensuring that we have adequate provision of wheelchair user homes.

Accessibility and adaptability

Kindly sponsored by The Dunhill Medical Trust, Housing LIN curates a number of useful resources on accessible and adaptable new and existing accommodation for older and disabled people, including Accessible Housing Registers.

This includes a recent Housing LIN guest blog by Joan Rutherford, Chair of the National Network of Older People’s Housing Champions, based on a talk delivered at Housing 2023 in Manchester and reflects on a 2022 Big Disability Survey by Greater Manchester Disable People's Panel. Joan alsohighlights the unmet need for wheelchair users to have the same opportunities as non-wheelchair users to buy their own homes, while sharing some of the creative strategies employed to overcome this.