The stairlift lottery: £723m, 151 councils, and the waiting-time data England does not publish

Published 13 August 2026

England will spend £723 million on Disabled Facilities Grants in 2026-27. That is the fund which pays for most stairlifts fitted at public expense. We took the government’s per-council allocation table, joined it to the population aged 65 and over in every upper-tier authority, and ranked all 151.

The spread between top and bottom is 6.2-fold. Manchester receives £191.05 for every resident aged 65 or over. Rutland receives £30.63.

The funding gap was not the most interesting thing we found. English councils already report how many adaptations they fit and how long people wait at each stage, every year, to central government. None of it reaches the public.

Key findings

• The £723m allocation works out at £65.83 per person aged 65 or over across England. The median council gets £70.45.
• Highest per older resident: Manchester £191.05, Brent £153.62, Tower Hamlets £152.51. Lowest: Rutland £30.63, Cheshire East £31.72, Leicestershire £36.33.
• The correlation between a council’s allocation per older person and its emergency falls admission rate for over-65s is weak, at r = 0.23.
• Per emergency falls admission in over-65s, allocations run from £9,943 in Tower Hamlets to £1,394 in Cheshire East, against an England average of £3,264.
• The £30,000 cap on an English DFG has not moved since 22 May 2008, a period of eighteen years.
• Councils report adaptation counts and stage-by-stage delivery times to government each year through the DELTA return. Individual scorecards go back only to the council that submitted them.
• In Wales, where waiting times have been measured, the average end-to-end wait in 2024/25 was 370 days, against 207 days in 2018/19.

Disabled Facilities Grant per person aged 65+, 2026-27

All 151 upper-tier authorities in England. Allocations come from Annex B of the MHCLG grant determination of 14 May 2026. County allocations are shown at upper-tier level and sum to £722.9m, which matches the announced £723m total. Population aged 65 and over is the denominator OHID uses for its falls indicators.

How fair a test of the formula is this?

Only a partial one, and the caveat matters. DFG is not an older people’s fund. It pays for adaptations for disabled people of any age, children included, and the allocation formula deliberately weights deprivation, health and disability need, housing conditions and tenure. Deprived urban authorities with younger populations will score well on that basis every time, and Manchester, Tower Hamlets and Newham are exactly that.

What the table measures is how far the money diverges from where older people live, and older people are who stairlifts are overwhelmingly for. A new allocation formula took effect in 2026-27 after a consultation whose response was published on 17 February 2026, intended to track local need more closely. Checking it against an independent measure of need among older people seems a reasonable thing to do, and on this measure the relationship is weak.

None of that makes the formula wrong. It does mean a resident’s chance of getting help with a stairlift depends heavily on which side of a council boundary they live, and that nothing published lets anyone find out whether the money is reaching them.

The data England collects and does not publish

English councils are asked each year to report their DFG activity through the DELTA system. The return asks how many grants involved access improvements, the category that contains stairlifts alongside ramps and widened doors, and for the average number of working days taken at each stage of delivery: referral to application, application to approval, approval to completion.

Foundations, the government-funded national body for DFGs and home improvement agencies, analyses that data and produces a scorecard for each authority. Its published position is that “we can only share individual scorecards with the local authorities that submitted the data”. The most recent performance reports available publicly cover 2018-19 and 2019-20.

A written answer in June 2023 set out the arrangement, stating that the department “collects voluntary local authority-level data returns, including information on local DFG delivery, via its DELTA system” and that “raw data from local authorities is analysed by Foundations”. The return is voluntary, which is a real constraint on what could be published, and it is worth being fair about that. The numbers still exist.

So England has no published answer to a simple question: how long does it take to get a stairlift fitted through a Disabled Facilities Grant where you live?

What Wales found when it asked

Wales does not publish this routinely either. National waiting-time reporting there was discontinued after 2019. In 2025 the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales wrote to all 22 Welsh councils and asked directly. Twenty-one answered. Bridgend did not.

Across 4,032 completed grants in 2024/25 the average end-to-end wait was 370 days, against 207 days in 2018/19. Torfaen came out best at 196 days. Ceredigion came out worst at 692. Conwy averaged 486. A quarter of councils reported waiting more than three months on average for the occupational therapy assessment alone.

There is no obvious reason England would be different. The English figures that have surfaced look similar. In August 2025 the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman found North Yorkshire Council was averaging 262 days simply to approve a DFG application, against government guidance that even the most complex cases should take no longer than 180, with a backlog of nearly 700 referrals not yet approved.

The statutory position, and why it does not bite

Section 34 of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 requires a council to notify an applicant whether a grant is approved or refused “as soon as reasonably practicable, and, in any event, not later than six months after the date of the application concerned”. Section 37 makes it a condition of payment that the works are carried out within twelve months of approval, though that is a condition attached to the grant rather than a duty on the council, and the authority may allow a further period.

The six-month clock starts at the application. It does not cover the wait for an occupational therapy assessment beforehand, which in Wales was the single largest source of delay. A council can comply with the statute in full while an applicant waits well over a year from first asking for help.

The maximum grant in England is still £30,000, set by a statutory instrument that came into force on 22 May 2008 and never raised since. Wales has moved to £36,000 and Northern Ireland to £35,000. The trade body Propertymark reports the average value of a high-value DFG claim at around £46,000 for adults and £58,000 for children, well above the English ceiling, which leaves the most complex adaptations dependent on the household or the council finding the difference.

Methodology

Allocations are taken from the MHCLG letter and grant determination to local authority chief executives dated 14 May 2026, Annex B, “Disabled Facilities Grant funding 2026-27”, read directly from the published PDF. Annex B lists Tier 1 and Tier 2 authorities separately, and district figures are components of their county total, so counting both would double up. We used upper-tier authorities only: counties, unitaries, metropolitan boroughs and London boroughs. As a check on the join, these sum to £722.9m against an announced total of £723m.

Population aged 65 and over, and falls admission rates, come from OHID Fingertips indicator 22401 for 2024/25 at upper-tier local authority level. City of London and the Isles of Scilly are not separately reported for that indicator, which is why 151 authorities appear rather than 153. The correlation is a Pearson coefficient between allocation per person aged 65 and over and the directly standardised falls admission rate.

Limitations. DFG allocations are not stairlift budgets. Stairlifts are one adaptation among many and no published national figure separates them out. An allocation is not the same as spend, and councils may add their own funds or carry money forward. Population aged 65 and over is a partial proxy for DFG need, since the grant serves disabled people of all ages. Nothing in this analysis shows or implies that any council is misusing money or failing in its duties.

Help us build the dataset England will not

We are submitting Freedom of Information requests to English upper-tier authorities for their DELTA returns: completed adaptations involving access improvements, and stage-by-stage delivery times. Results will be published on this page as a council-level waiting-times table, free to use.

If you work for a council and would rather send the figures directly, or you are a journalist who wants the allocation join before the FOI round lands, get in touch.

Sources

• MHCLG Disabled Facilities Grant determination 2026-27, Annex B (published via Foundations).
• OHID Public Health Profiles (Fingertips), indicator 22401.
• Foundations DELTA return guidance and DFG scorecards.
• Written question UIN 188953, answered 20 June 2023.
• Older People’s Commissioner for Wales, Time to Adapt, 2025.
• Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, 21 August 2025.
• Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, s.34 and s.37; SI 2008/1189 for the £30,000 maximum.
• Propertymark, 20 February 2026, for the high-value claim averages.

Licence and reuse

Full dataset: dfg-allocations-per-older-person-england-2026-27.csv, covering all 151 authorities with allocation, population, per-head figures, falls admissions and allocation per admission.

The selection, structure and presentation of this dataset, being the parts in which Review Mobility holds copyright and database right, are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. The underlying figures remain the property of their sources on the terms below.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Office for Health Improvement & Disparities. Public Health Profiles. Accessed 13 August 2026. https://fingertips.phe.org.uk © Crown copyright 2026.

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.

Suggested citation: Review Mobility (2026) Disabled Facilities Grant allocations per older person, England 2026-27. Analysis of the MHCLG grant determination Annex B and OHID Fingertips. Available at: https://reviewmobility.co.uk/news/dfg-stairlift-funding-postcode-lottery/

If you think anything here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and note the correction on this page. Any council or organisation named is welcome to a right of reply, which we will publish.

This article is general information, not legal advice, and it does not take account of anyone’s particular circumstances. Anyone having difficulty with a grant application should speak to their council, Citizens Advice or the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.

This research was produced by Review Mobility and was not commissioned or paid for by any third party. It carries no affiliate links.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Disabled Facilities Grants and Stairlifts

Does a Disabled Facilities Grant pay for a stairlift?

Yes. A stairlift is one of the adaptations a Disabled Facilities Grant can fund, where it is necessary and appropriate to meet a disabled person’s needs and reasonable and practicable for the property. In the government’s own data return, stairlifts are counted within the category “access improvements”, alongside ramps and widened doorways.

How much is a Disabled Facilities Grant worth in England?

The maximum is £30,000. That ceiling was set by a statutory instrument which came into force on 22 May 2008 and has not been increased since. The maximum is £36,000 in Wales and £35,000 in Northern Ireland. Scotland runs a different Scheme of Assistance.

Which council gets the most Disabled Facilities Grant funding per older resident?

Manchester, at £191.05 per resident aged 65 or over in 2026-27. The lowest is Rutland at £30.63. The England average is £65.83 per person aged 65 and over, from a total allocation of £723 million.

How long does it take to get a stairlift through a Disabled Facilities Grant?

England does not publish this. The only recent national measurement in Britain comes from Wales, where the average end-to-end wait in 2024/25 was 370 days, ranging from 196 days in Torfaen to 692 days in Ceredigion. In England, the Ombudsman found North Yorkshire Council averaging 262 days just to approve an application in 2025.

Is there a legal time limit on how long a council can take?

There is, but a limited one. Section 34 of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 requires a council to decide an application within six months of the date of the application. That clock does not start until the application is made, so it excludes the wait for an occupational therapy assessment beforehand, which is often the longest stage of all.

Why does funding vary so much between councils?

Allocations follow a national formula, revised for 2026-27, which weights deprivation, health and disability need, housing conditions and tenure rather than the size of the older population. That is why deprived urban authorities with relatively young populations receive more per older resident. Our analysis found only a weak relationship, r = 0.23, between a council’s allocation per older person and its emergency falls admission rate for over-65s.

Can I appeal if my council refuses or delays a grant?

Use the council’s formal complaints procedure first, then complain to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, which investigates delay and maladministration in DFG cases and has upheld a number of them. The Ombudsman publishes its decisions, including a dedicated Disabled Facilities Grants category.

Can I use this data in my own reporting?

Yes. The dataset is a free CSV download, reusable with credit to Review Mobility and a link to this page, under the licence terms set out above. We can supply regional cuts or single-authority figures on request.

Published 13 August 2026