Evaluation of the Inclusive Transport Strategy

About the Study

The Government’s ambitions for inclusive transport are to ensure disabled people have the same access to transport as everyone else and for them to travel confidently, easily and without extra cost.

Between 2020 and 2024, the Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned NatCen to evaluate the ITS to explore whether and how the strategy is achieving its goals.  

Key learnings

• Improved reliability and regularity of transport services would benefit disabled people even more than non-disabled people. This is because unplanned changes, such as journey delays, can lead to severe consequences for disabled people, such as pain due to medication wearing off.
• Furthermore, overcrowding had a wide range of impacts on disabled people, including difficulty accessing seating or wheelchair spaces, increased likelihood of bumps and falls, difficulty seeing or hearing live journey information and social anxiety associated with being in close proximity to other people.
• It is vital to consider how other inequalities and social stigma overlap with disability. The research found that some disabled people travel by modes that they find less accessible because they cannot afford accessible ones; it also found that those with less outwardly visible health conditions—such as mental health conditions—can internalise societal preconceptions about what disability looks like and feel undeserving of extra help and adjustments.
• Providing journey information in advance is vital in helping to alleviate the anxiety that can accompany travel. But it is important to find ways of providing this information to disabled people who are less digitally capable and not rely solely on apps and websites.
• Making the bus and train network fully accessible to all groups of disabled people may not be realistically possible. Attention should therefore also be given to alternative modes of transport, such as concessionary or subsidised use of taxis/PHVs, or expanded community transport services (which includes a range of local services including minibuses, carsharing, hospital transport, and others).
• Policy commitments on accessible travel should be ambitious, deliverable and measurable. They should be defined narrowly enough to make clear what is required and enable accountability, while being open-ended enough to stimulate continued improvements. Commitments must also be realistic: those with limited funding attached should not necessarily be expected to produce transformational outcomes.
• Where possible, policymakers should balance communication, funding, regulation and enforcement. The research found that DfT’s encouragement of wider stakeholders in the transport industry to undertake accessibility initiatives was not always effective, and that more substantial change was achieved when communication could be accompanied by funding, or by regulation and enforcement.

Methodology

The evaluation of the ITS ran from 2020 to 2024 and involved extensive mixed-method fieldwork to assess the extent to which the programme had achieved its objectives.

The findings were informed by:

• a large-scale survey with two waves (in 2020 and 2023)
• qualitative interviews with disabled people
• interviews with transport stakeholders
• secondary data analysis