Disabled people in England wait up to two years for wheelchairs, ombudsman finds

Elliot Cruz Gardiyanoglu was three when he was meant to start nursery alongside his twin brother. He has cerebral palsy, and he needed a wheelchair to go. It took seven months to arrive. While his parents waited, they used an adapted buggy, and Elliot fell from it several times and hurt himself. He also missed out on education and specialist therapy during that stretch.

His case appears in a report by Paula Sussex, the parliamentary and health service ombudsman for England, who found that disabled people are waiting up to two years for a wheelchair. The delays involve both NHS bodies and the private firms that make the chairs. Sussex said the hold-ups have profound consequences and limit wheelchair users' ability to lead independent lives.

She opened her investigation into NHS wheelchair provision after complaints rose sharply, from eight in 2020-21 to 110 in 2025-26. Four in five of those complaints concern the handful of private companies that supply wheelchairs to at least half of all the children and adults who need one. Most are about people waiting longer than the supposed 18-week maximum, either for the chair itself or for parts for it.

Elliot is now six. His mother, Jania Cruz, said the family was never told the wait would be so long. Had they known, she said, they would have looked for other ways to get a chair, especially so that he did not miss starting nursery with his brother. She described how hard it was for him to watch his brother go to school while he could not. Rachel Perrin, director of the children's charity Newlife, said his experience shows how the wrong wheelchair, or none at all, can be dangerous and can keep families trapped at home, unable to attend school or join activities with siblings and friends.

The report also describes the experience of Graham Woolner, 68, of Bishop's Stortford, who has the degenerative condition spinal muscular atrophy and has used a wheelchair for 15 years. A replacement was due by August 2023. It arrived in September 2024 and did not work properly. He received one in full working order only in October 2025, 26 months past the 18-week deadline. The first chair broke on its first day: he got 100 yards before the batteries died, and the fault was never fixed. For a year he could not go anywhere with any certainty of getting back. He said he stopped going out without his son in case he needed to be pushed home, and described the chair as effectively his legs.

Sussex points to a regulatory gap. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency oversees the equipment, but the Care Quality Commission, the NHS care watchdog, does not cover the services wheelchair users receive, such as assessment, fitting and repair, because they are not supervised by a health professional. Integrated care boards, the regional NHS bodies that commission wheelchair services, have unreliable information on how many people locally need a chair. They face an uncompetitive market dominated by a few private providers, and they are poor at warning one another about firms delivering bad service.

Nick Goldup, chief executive of the Wheelchair Alliance, said the report shines a light on systemic problems. An NHS spokesperson called long waits unacceptable and pointed to a wheelchair quality framework, co-produced with users, which expects 92% of people to receive equipment within 18 weeks and requires commissioners to hold regular performance meetings with providers. The question the report leaves open is whether that expectation can be met while no regulator covers the services themselves.