For architects and design teams

Most access consultants arrive at the end, with a clipboard and a list of things you can no longer change. That is the expensive way round.

Early involvement is the cheaper option, not the expensive one. That is the whole pitch.

Advisor, not enforcement

An access consultant who behaves like regulations police, quoting clauses and issuing fails, gets designed around and stops being invited early. I would rather be useful.

So: constraints are real, and a recommendation that ignores a structural or services reality deserves to be dismissed. Every finding comes with three levels of intervention and a cost band for each, which hands you actual choices rather than a single verdict. And every feature worth defending gets tied to risk rather than to preference, so that when value engineering arrives it is understood as liability reduction rather than as my opinion.

Findings also arrive in your language and while the decision is still open. "The entrance excludes wheelchair users and neurodivergent visitors" is a problem statement. The same finding with the intervention levels and their cost bands attached is design input.

Where I fit in the RIBA Plan of Work

The audit is not one product. It changes shape by stage, and so does what it is worth.

RIBA published the Inclusive Design Overlay to the RIBA Plan of Work in 2023, specifically to stop inclusive design being treated as an add-on. It is the single most useful document for explaining why an access consultant belongs on the team from the outset rather than at sign-off.

The Plan of Work, end to end

1. Strategic Definition
2. Preparation and Briefing
3. Concept Design
4. Spatial Coordination
5. Technical Design
6. Construction
7. Handover
8. Use

Stage 0, Strategic Definition

Ambition, not detail. This is where the project decides whether it is aiming at the statutory minimum, at BS 8300 best practice, or at genuinely exemplary inclusion. It is also where site-level access risk gets flagged before anyone is committed, and where the features that only survive if they are budgeted early, a Changing Places toilet, an evacuation lift, get named in the business case.

Stage 1, Preparation and Briefing

Standards get locked into the brief, and user consultation starts. On a refurbishment this is where a full audit of the existing building does its most valuable work, because it establishes the constraints the design has to answer. At Stage 1 an audit is briefing intelligence, not a snag list.

Stage 2, Concept Design

The decisive stage. Core location, level strategy, entrance approach and rough sanitary provision are all set here, and every one of them is cheap to move on a drawing and ruinous to move later.

A Stage 2 review protects the fundamentals: one inclusive entrance rather than a dignified front door plus a back-of-house ramp by the bins; level floor plates; lifts that serve every floor and are visible from arrival. This is where the Physical and Emotional domains are won or lost structurally, before a single finish is chosen.

Stage 3, Spatial Coordination

The layout coordinates and the planning application goes in, which means the access element of the Design and Access Statement is written now. The review moves to detailed layouts: corridor and door widths, turning circles, the evacuation strategy including refuge locations and evacuation lift, and external works such as path gradients and parking.

Stage 4, Technical Design

Detail. Visual contrast expressed as Light Reflectance Value differences, slip resistance, ironmongery and opening forces, exact fixture heights, lux levels, signage and tactile specification. The deliverable is an access specification that feeds the NBS spec and supports you through Building Control on Part M.

Stage 5, Construction

Site inspection, and defending the inclusive features against value engineering. The real risk here is that a Stage 2 commitment, say an evacuation lift, is quietly stripped for cost with nobody tracking the consequence.

Stage 6, Handover

Final inspection, and training the facilities team. This is the stage everyone skips and it is the reason induction loops sit switched off in buildings that paid for them.

Stage 7, Use

Post-occupancy evaluation after a year, asking disabled users the only question that matters, which is whether it actually works. Then a cycle every three to five years, because management drift is what turns a compliant building back into a hostile one. The blocked accessible toilet. The box stored in the refuge.

The golden thread

The Building Safety Act 2022 established the principle of a golden thread of information for fire safety. The same discipline applies to access: a decision made at Stage 2 must not be silently deleted at Stage 5.

Being the person who notices that the evacuation lift has disappeared from the drawings is a real part of the value, and it protects the client against liability later.

Design and Access Statements

Writing or reviewing the access section of a DAS is one of the clearest deliverables I produce. It is what turns a set of findings into an argument a planning authority can approve.

A good access section covers the inclusive design philosophy for the scheme, the access strategy and how local policy is reflected, what consultation happened and how it changed the proposal, how people reach and move through the development including by public transport, why the main access points were chosen, and how inclusive access will be maintained over the building's life.

What I record, and why it protects you

Advice given and decisions taken are documented plainly: I advised this, the client chose that, I recorded the risk. That protects your decision-making record as much as my professional position, and it means nobody has to reconstruct from memory two years later why something was done the way it was.

None of that softens the standard. It makes the standard survivable inside a real project.

Design-stage review prices are published in full, alongside everything else.