Cross with Cardiff!

I'm cross with Cardiff! Well, I'm slightly miffed with the whole of Wales but that's for a different reason.

Actually, it's just Cardiff estate agents that I'm cross with. Trouble is, what is true in Cardiff is equally true for a whole lot of cities across the UK.

We were asked this week to find an accessible property (sale or rent) for a disabled person in Cardiff. There are none currently advertised on the APR website so I used our favourite database to see what I could find. The answer is that, although nearly 3000 properties are available for sale in Cardiff, not one can be identified as wheelchair accessible (actually, that's not quite true - there is one but it's sold!).

The reality is that, like most places, there will be a number of accessible properties available, including some which might well meet the requirements of our specific client, but estate agents don't identify them. If estate agents don't identify accessible property there is no way that we or any other search can do so. So, it's all down to estate agents...

Except is it? Are we all too accepting the situation? We don't expect estate agents to identify accessible property, so they don't recognise a demand, so they don't identify it, so we don't expect them to.... etc, etc. More pressure needed here, I think. And just about everywhere else in the UK.

My more general miffedness is to do with tourism board website Visit Wales. Both Enjoy England and Visit Scotland now make it fairly easy for visitors to identify accommodation that will meet their access needs. I sort of assumed that it would be the same with Wales but there is simply no way of identifying wheelchair accessible accommodation from the website.

I did get an apology and an acknowledgement that they are 'aware of the situation'. Let's hope being 'aware of the situation' turns into some sort of action sometime soon.