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The government is preparing to devolve more powers to shape transport systems to local and regional authorities.
Despite making up one-fifth of the UK population, disabled people’s calls for barrier-free public transport that will allow them to live independent, healthy and fulfilling lives have been neglected by politicians of all stripes.
New research from the National Centre for Accessible Transport explores how we can build the capacity of local government to deliver inclusive transport.
A lack of funding, expertise and standards
Our Equipping Councils for Change report finds that local government transport staff often struggle to meet their legal responsibilities due to a combination of a lack of funding, expertise and good practice standards to help guide their work. The study is based on surveys, focus groups and interviews with disabled people and transport staff working for local and regional authorities across the UK.
Our research shows that staff believe that national and local political leaders need to invest more money in accessible transport. But we have also found that a lack of knowledge and expertise in disability means more must be done to help local authority staff better advise and support political leaders to make sure that funds are spent effectively.
The financial pressures of the past 15 years have forced many authorities to make trained accessibility specialists redundant.
As a result, local government is struggling to meet key requirements under the Equality Act 2010.
To rebuild this lost capacity, we must create new standards and education and training frameworks to support transport staff and involve disabled people in transport decision-making.
We conducted a UK-wide survey of 42 local government transport staff whose work either focused exclusively on making services accessible or included responsibility for accessibility as part of a wider remit.
Limited funding emerged as the main barrier to achieving accessible transport. Two-thirds gave ‘limited budgets’ a score of at least eight out of 10 in terms of significance, with 32% assigning it the maximum 10 out of 10.
The next biggest concern was retrofitting accessibility features into existing services, which received scores of seven or higher from three-quarters of respondents, followed by a lack of staff time and expertise, rated at least eight by 57%.
From “tokenistic” training to “tick-box” equality assessments
Our focus groups and interviews show that staff also needed better guidance to help them do their jobs more effectively. For example, one of our interviewees pointed out that “dedicated funding pots [for accessibility] end up being spent on retrofit... whereas what we should be doing is designing it in the right way in the first place.”
However, staff often do not have the evidence or tools to make the case to their leaders that accessibility should be embedded into projects from the beginning.
Local government staff reported that the training available to them varies widely in quality. This ranged from those who had degrees in subjects such as architecture and engineering, during which they studied accessible building regulations, to “tokenistic” online modules.
Professionals also told us the equality impact assessments required by law to understand the likely effect of new policies and programmes on disabled people had become “tick-box exercises”. One interviewee said they thought assessments were vital, but “my worry is… we haven't had the training to do it properly”. Another felt that the lack of legal oversight in completing assessments increased the risk of an “awful” decision slipping through.
Putting disabled people in decision-making roles
The problems that we have highlighted point to systemic inequalities that demand action from both local and national governments as well as educational institutions and professional bodies. At every stage, policymakers must make sure that disabled people themselves are actively involved in shaping the future of local transport systems.
We have come across many examples of good practice. Staff have told us about training courses run by disabled people’s organisations that have had a lasting impact on how they approach their jobs. We were told about a visually impaired councillor who used his lived experience of disability to reshape how transport policy was made at his authority.
We are calling on the government to create a single website where local government transport staff and disabled people can find and understand regulations, guidance, case law and other resources relevant to making transport accessible. This will allow visitors to grasp the responsibilities of the local government to provide accessible transport and discover the tools and good practices that they can use to meet them.
The government should also renew existing programmes to support disabled people to take part in policymaking by fully reinstating the Access to Elected Office Fund to help them run for office, and commission a public awareness campaign to show the impact disabled people can make when they are represented in decision making at the highest levels.
Our report urges local and regional authorities to assess their organisational readiness, including reviewing whether their authority employs officers with a dedicated accessibility role and that they have the necessary resources and backing from their leaders to do their jobs.
The National Centre for Accessible Transport is exploring new projects that will support policymakers to put our recommendations into action. These projects will be announced over the next few months. We look forward to continuing to promote work with local government leaders to make transport accessible for disabled people.
This research was conducted by the National Centre for Accessible Transport (ncat), established in 2023 to create a barrier-free transport system for disabled people through the adoption of robust evidence.
Clive is the lead author of Equipping Councils for Change: Building local government capacity to deliver accessible transport with disabled people. The full report can be downloaded from the ncat website.
