Motability: Active Travel Grant

Motability’s new Active Travel Grant Programme will help charities and organisations to improve and expand access to quality and affordable active travel equipment and journeys, to ensure disabled people have the same opportunities to make decisions about how they travel, their impact on the environment and to enjoy the physical and mental health benefits that active travel can provide.

Examples of areas where we are focussing our grant making include but are not limited to:

• Providing funding to ensure the voices and needs of disabled people inform and influence design requirements, and crucially, that they are shared with industry and Government to raise awareness.
• Providing funding of charitable programmes that introduce disabled people to different active travel products and services.
• Supporting existing programmes that have a clear focus on increasing travel confidence and safety for disabled people, to enable them to confidently use active travel products and services.
• Providing funding to schemes, programmes and initiatives that are already successful in supporting Active Travel and provide best practice solutions but need further support to remain operational or increase the service they provide, to help more disabled people.
• Providing funding to programmes, charities or organisations to help fund more high quality and affordable active travel equipment for disabled people.

Charities and organisations can apply for grants from £100,000 to £4 million at any point over the next three years.

Why are we doing this?

It is crucial that disabled people have the same level of access to different modes of travel to enable them to independently make whatever journeys they want. However, the limited publicly available research there is available on active travel shows that disabled people walk and cycle far less, even though they want to.

Being able to get around under your own steam, whether for work or leisure, is something that everyone should be able to do, therefore Motability has identified improving access to inclusive active travel opportunities for disabled people as a priority area for focus and investment.