'Accessible' new builds: visit, but don't move in

After a suitable council home for a wheelchair user? Prepare to wait 47 years, says Melanie Reid

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If you haven't travelled up England by the west coast mainline recently, prepare to be startled. The journey is a blur of construction sites: in the fields everywhere, flags fly over show homes, brickies toil, diggers carve out streets to come.

For those who appreciate the scale of Britain's housing crisis, it is heartening evidence that we are starting to address the problem.

One question, though, tends to go both unasked and unanswered: how many of these new houses will suit disabled people? The figures illustrating the need are stark.

According to the Centre for Ageing Better, about 13 million disabled people in the UK inhabit unsuitable accommodation, their lives limited and difficult, their independence thwarted. This includes one in five disabled people in social housing.