Building work has started on a supported living scheme in Lytham St Annes. When it is finished in summer 2027 it will hold nine self-contained apartments for people with a learning disability and for autistic people.
Adult social care is my brief at County Hall, so let me set out plainly what is being built, who is building it, and what it does and does not solve.
What is actually going up
Nine accessible, self-contained apartments. Communal areas and a garden. Wet rooms. Accommodation on site for staff so that care and support is there 24 hours a day.
The support for tenants will be provided by Swanton Care. The scheme itself is being developed by RWP, one of the largest providers of supported living accommodation in the country, in partnership with Lancashire County Council. County Councillor Martyn Sutton marked the start of the work at the site with RWP’s managing director Les Warren and its director of growth and partnerships Nicola Byrne.
RWP say the building will use air source heat pumps and other energy efficient technology to hold down its carbon impact. On a scheme where tenants will be paying the heating bills for decades, that is not a decoration. It is part of whether the accommodation stays affordable.
Why a front door is the whole point
The phrase the county council uses is “their own front door”, and it is worth slowing down on, because it is the difference between two completely different lives.
One version of care for a disabled adult is a bed in a building that belongs to somebody else, on somebody else’s timetable, with somebody else deciding who comes in. The other is a tenancy. Your own flat. Your own key. Support that turns up because you need it, not because the building is organised around delivering it.
The second is more expensive to build and cheaper to be a human being in. It is the direction the council is committed to under its Housing with Care and Support Strategy, which is modernising the supported living offer towards apartments and bungalows rather than shared institutional settings.
What I said when the work started:
It’s fantastic to see work starting, to build apartments which will allow people to live safely and as independently as possible, with the reassurance that support is available whenever they need it. People who live in similar developments across Lancashire have formed strong friendships and become an important part of the local community and I can’t wait to visit when the work is complete.
I meant it. I also want to be honest about the size of it.
Nine is nine
This is one scheme, and it is nine apartments, and it opens in about a year’s time. Nobody should read a sod cutting as a solved problem. Lancashire is a county of well over a million people and the number of adults with a learning disability who are living somewhere that does not suit them, or who are waiting on a parent in their seventies to keep going a bit longer, is a great deal larger than nine.
The honest test of a strategy is not the first scheme. It is the second, the fifth and the twelfth, and how fast they follow. That is the bit I am accountable for, and it is the bit I would rather be judged on.
So: good day for nine households in Lytham St Annes, and a small down payment on a much larger bill that the country has been deferring for thirty years.
Where these numbers come from
Every fact above about the scheme comes from Lancashire County Council’s announcement of 27 August 2026, Work starts on new supported living scheme in Lytham St Annes. That is the source for the nine apartments, the accessible and self-contained design, the communal areas, garden and wet rooms, the on-site staff accommodation and 24-hour support, the summer 2027 completion date, the roles of RWP and Swanton Care, the attendance at the site, the air source heat pumps, and the reference to the council’s Housing with Care and Support Strategy. My own quotation is reproduced from that announcement word for word.
Background on what supported living means in practice, and what the council offers, is at Lancashire County Council: housing for people with learning disabilities.
The characterisation of the difference a tenancy makes, and the closing point about scale, are my own argument rather than figures taken from the council. I have deliberately not attached a number to unmet need in Lancashire here, because I am not willing to publish one I have not verified at source. When I have that figure properly, I will publish it, including if it is uncomfortable.