No place like an accessible home: quality of life and opportunity for disabled people with accessible housing needs

Habinteg Housing and Papworth Trust commissioned CASE at LSE to report, primarily in relation to working age disabled people, on: 1. The extent of need for housing which has accessible features (for example a stair lift), and the impact on disabled people of living in a home where their need for such a feature is not met. These impacts include economic impacts such as working patterns, income, assets, as well as impacts on wider quality of life. 2. More specifically, how far unmet need for accessibility features, or lack of access to suitable housing options, is associated with disabled people not being in work. 3. The impact of the above factors on housing choices, including what proportion of households containing a disabled person are currently, or might be in a position to become, owner-occupiers. We were also asked to advise on potential changes to data collected for large scale surveys which might enable them to become a more useful source of information for policy-makers, developers and advocacy groups. This report is part of a programme of research commissioned by Papworth Trust and Habinteg Housing. Ipsos MORI conducted opinion research on public attitudes, and further work is being done by the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University around improving information about households containing disabled people for developers of housing and council planners.