It’s a shocking fact that in 2025, just half of London’s train stations are fully accessible for disabled people. The city lags behind the country at large, with 61 per cent of stations containing step-free access.
The paltry supply of genuinely accessible public transport in the capital doesn’t just affect London’s 1.2 million disabled people: it impacts anyone who, for whatever reason, can’t effortlessly bound up and down flights of stairs. Parents with pushchairs and the elderly are similarly barred from using swathes of London’s rail network.
And even where stations do contain lifts, too often these are poorly maintained and left unrepaired when they stop working for weeks on end, leaving passengers with limited mobility forced to miss days at work or crucial hospital appointments.
That reality was highlighted this week when the News went to see a wheelchair user from Herne Hill called Nathan, who claimed the ‘chronically broken’ lift in that station has been out of use for three weeks.
Our video of Nathan explaining the problems he faces when the lifts pack up has been viewed by almost half a million people on social media, suggesting it is an issue with a wide resonance in London.
Shockingly, Nathan explained that when the Herne Hill lifts are down his commute home from Greenwich can sometimes take up to five hours because he has to be put on a train to another station further out so he can either cross the platform and come back or be met by a taxi and escorted home, a service rail companies are legally obliged to provide. But this system frequently snags when, for example, there aren’t any staff to meet him at the station he has been sent to, meaning he can’t get off the train onto the platform because no one is there to put down a ramp.
Worse, Nathan says he has often been stuck on the platform shivering in Bromley late into the night when the rail company has forgotten to organise him a taxi to bring him home.
He is almost entirely dependent on the Herne Hill lifts behaving properly so he can live his life as all of us should be able to do: most other stations in the area don’t have any lifts at all, and those that do like Denmark Hill are similarly temperamental.
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Buses are a challenge because he has to compete for space with prams and pets, and services such as Dial-A-Ride and the taxi service offered by train operators require pre-booking and often won’t take him where he needs to go.
We previously shone a light on similar issues at Peckham Rye Station, which recently lost out after a promised £40 million upgrade which would have given it lifts for the first time was shelved due to a lack of funding.
But dig deeper, and this rote justification deployed by Network Rail is unsatisfying. Back in 2019, the government gave Network Rail £350 million to spend on delivering step-free access upgrades – granted, this covered stations all across the UK meaning London was forced to compete for funding with the rest of the country.
But last year it was revealed by the Disability News Service that the body recorded an underspend of £65 million in the five years to 2024 – surely the first time a transport infrastructure project in this country has spent less than its allocated budget.
What has gone wrong with Access for All to get us to a point where Peckham Rye, the busiest interchange in the country without lifts, isn’t high-priority enough?
We will continue to investigate and shed light on the scandalous deficiency of accessible transport in London until transport chiefs make it more of a priority.
1.2 million Londoners do not require a wheelchair, that’s 20% of the whole city.
You’ve confused it with the national statistic!