Britain’s Mobility Suppliers Mapped: What 705 Listings Show

Anyone trying to buy a stairlift, a scooter or a wet room starts with the same problem: finding a supplier who is near them, still trading, and actually sells the thing they need. Search results do not tell you which businesses have closed. Neither do the trade directories, which is how dead entries survive in them for years.

We hold a directory of 705 UK mobility suppliers, so we are in a position to check. This is what it shows about where the trade is, what it sells, and how much of it is still there.

Where the suppliers are

Every listing with a valid postcode was matched to its nation, region and local authority district. 585 of the 705 listings carry a postcode, and 576 of those resolved to a real location.

Within England, the spread is not what most people would guess. The East Midlands has the most listed suppliers of any region, and London has fewer than the South West.

The single densest district is Bradford, with 18 listed suppliers, which is more than the whole of the North East region. Buckinghamshire, Somerset and the East Riding of Yorkshire follow with ten each.

We are deliberately not turning these into suppliers per head of population, and it is worth saying why. A directory is built by finding businesses, and finding them is easier in some places than others. A region with few listings may have few suppliers, or may simply be under-represented in our data. The honest claim is narrower: this is where the suppliers we know about are, and if you live in the North East or Northern Ireland, your choice from this directory is materially smaller than someone in Yorkshire.

What they sell

Listings can carry more than one category, so these add up to more than 705. The pattern is a trade built around stairlifts and scooters, with very little at the specialist end.

Eighteen stairlift suppliers for every home lift supplier is the number that stands out. It is part of why home lift quotes are so hard to compare: in most of the country there is no local market to compare against, and buyers are choosing between two or three national firms that will travel to them.

How many of them still exist

This is the part a directory can check and a search engine cannot. We took a systematic sample, every eleventh listing in order of when it was added, giving 60 suppliers spread across categories and regions, and opened each website on 24 August 2026.

Of the 58 we could reach a conclusion on, 86 per cent were live and unchanged, 5 per cent had become another business and 9 per cent were dead. The five dead sites failed in three different ways, which is worth knowing if you are ever wondering whether a supplier has gone: two had no DNS record at all, two refused connections, and one had a broken security certificate that stops the site loading in any modern browser.

The three that had become a different business are the more interesting cases, because a customer following an old link would not necessarily notice:

• The address listed for Proactive Mobility now serves e-goes, a folding powered mobility brand. The name Proactive appears nowhere on the page.
• The address listed for Norfolk Mobility Scooters now serves Be Active Mobility, in the same county and the same trade, but the old name does not appear on the page.
• The address listed for Rugby Mobility Bathroom resolves to Living Well Bathrooms in Nottingham, whose own site carries a second rename on top of it: “AHM Installations is now Living Well Bathrooms”.

Among the sites that were live, nine carried a copyright year of 2024 or earlier, four of them 2018 or earlier, including one still running an abandoned hibu template stamped 2016. A stale copyright line is not proof a business has stopped trading, but for a company that expects customers to phone it, a site untouched since 2017 is a signal worth reading.

Four acquisitions or renames turned up in a sample of sixty, all of them stated on the companies’ own sites: Gerald Simonds Healthcare is now part of Midshires Mobility Group, Contour Showers was acquired by AKW Holdings in 2022, NRS Healthcare describes itself as part of the Mobilitas Group, and Webster Wheelchairs now trades as The Mobility Outlet. This is a consolidating trade, and the shop you bought from five years ago may answer to a different name today.

What this means if you are buying

Check the company still exists before you plan around it. A live website is a weak signal, but no website, or one that has not been touched since 2018, is a strong one. Companies House will tell you whether the company is still filing accounts.

Ask who owns them now. Four in sixty had changed hands or changed name. It matters for a warranty, because the entity that promised you a lifetime warranty may not be the entity answering the phone.

If you want a home lift, expect to look nationally. With 17 suppliers in a directory of 705, most people have no local option, which also means no local competitor to price against.

Do not assume a big region means a big choice. London has 33 listed suppliers against Yorkshire’s 75. Density of population and density of mobility retail are not the same thing.

Method

The dataset is the 705 published supplier listings on Review Mobility as at 24 August 2026. Locations come from each listing’s postcode, resolved through the postcodes.io lookup service, which returns the nation, region and local authority district recorded for that postcode. 585 listings carry a postcode and 576 resolved; the remaining 129 are either online-only sellers, national brands with no single address, or listings where we hold no postcode.

Category counts come from the categories on each listing, and a listing can hold several, so those figures overlap.

The website check is a systematic sample: listings were ordered by their internal identifier, which reflects the order they were added, and every eleventh one was taken, giving 60. Each home page was opened individually on 24 August 2026 and given one status. Two could not be reached because the servers refused us, and those are excluded from the percentages rather than counted as dead.

The limits, plainly. This is a census of our directory, not of the UK mobility trade. Suppliers we have never listed are invisible to it, and the way a directory is built biases which places and categories fill up first. Percentages from a 60-item sample carry real uncertainty: the true dead-site rate across all 705 could reasonably be several points either side of 9 per cent. Everything here is a statement about 705 listings on one date, and both the listings and the websites will have moved by the time you read it.

The pages we read. The three websites named above were opened on 24 August 2026 at e-goes.co.uk, beactivemobility.co.uk and livingwellbathrooms.co.uk. Each quotation is the wording published on that date. The five sites recorded as dead are not named, because a website that will not load is a weak basis for naming a company in public, and the point of the figure is the rate rather than the roll call.

What a broken website does and does not tell you. A site that will not load is evidence about a website, not about a company. Businesses change domain, let a certificate lapse, or stop maintaining a site they never used for sales, and carry on trading exactly as before. We did not phone any of these companies, so nothing here should be read as saying a named business has closed. Equally, a site that has become a different brand may reflect a rename, a sale or a new tenant of the domain, and we have described only what the page shows.

If you run one of these businesses and something above is out of date, email us at hello@reviewmobility.co.uk and we will correct the listing and note what changed. That is the only way a directory stays honest.

Disclosure. Review Mobility runs this directory and offers optional paid listings. No company paid to appear in this analysis, and holding a paid listing does not affect how a business is described here.

Frequently asked questions

How many mobility suppliers are there in the UK?

Nobody publishes an authoritative count. Our directory holds 705 published listings as at 24 August 2026, which is a large sample of the trade rather than a complete register. There is no licensing regime for mobility retail, so no official list exists to check against.

Which part of the UK has the fewest mobility suppliers?

Of the 576 listings we could map, Northern Ireland has 13 and the North East of England has 15. Both are far behind the East Midlands on 85 and Yorkshire and The Humber on 75. Some of that gap is real and some of it reflects how directories get built, so treat it as a guide to choice rather than a measure of the market.

Why are there so few home lift suppliers?

Home lifts are a small, specialist market compared with stairlifts. Our directory holds 17 home lift suppliers against 310 stairlift suppliers. In practice most buyers are dealing with a handful of national manufacturers and their installers rather than a local shop.

How often do mobility supplier websites disappear?

In our sample of 60, five sites were completely dead and three had become a different business, so about one in seven was no longer what the listing said it was. Our directory had been fully audited ten weeks earlier, which gives some idea of how fast these entries decay.

How can I check whether a mobility company is still trading?

Look for three things. A website that has been updated recently, a phone number that is answered, and a filing history at Companies House that is up to date. A company that has stopped filing accounts, or whose site has not changed in several years, is worth a call before you pay a deposit.