Accessible City Strategy

Brighton & Hove’s new Accessible City Strategy has been agreed upon, embedding accessibility and disability inclusion principles into how we work as an employer and service provider.

Our vision is to make Brighton & Hove welcoming, inclusive and accessible for the diverse community of people who live, work, or visit Brighton & Hove, irrespective of their access requirements.

Aims of the strategy

With the Accessible City Strategy, we aim to put accessibility at the heart of how we think, work, design and deliver our services from the very start. We aim to support all individuals we serve to have equal access to everything our city has to offer.

As a council, we commit to fighting ableism and addressing inequity for all diverse D/deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent people created by ableist policies, practice and culture within Brighton & Hove City Council and Brighton & Hove.

We strive to identify opportunities to take a civic lead and inspire inclusive, accessible, and anti-racist change within our sphere of influence.

The Accessible City Strategy follows a social model of disability, which says that people are disabled by barriers in society, rather than by their impairment or difference.

We aim to be informed by best practices and to go beyond the minimum legal compliance with the Equality Act.

Collaboration on the strategy

The Accessible City Strategy is informed by community consultations with disabled people’s organisations and individuals from within Brighton & Hove City Council and Brighton & Hove. It builds on existing Brighton & Hove City Council work and contribution to accessibility within Brighton & Hove, and reviews our current approaches, starting new work where it's needed.

All our council directorates contributed to the drafting of the Accessible City Strategy and have established their own action plans to ensure that inclusive design principles are implemented consistently from the very start across all council work.

The action plans will be regularly monitored and reviewed to guarantee accountability and continuous improvement.

Strategic actions we will focus on to become an accessible council

Brighton & Hove City Council is committed to long-term actions and change. The Accessible City Strategy sets out 3 key areas Brighton & Hove City Council will focus on over the next 5 years:

  1. Community engagement: increasing and improving our communication and engagement with disabled residents, service users, customers, visitors, and tenants.
  2. Data: improving the collection, analysis, and application of qualitative, quantitative, and intersectional data regarding disabled residents.
  3. Policy and practice: identifying, reviewing and co-producing key policies, plans, strategies, and work, embedding inclusive-design principles to better understand their impact, removing barriers, and improving outcomes for disabled people, with intersectional insights.