Welcome from Adur & Worthing Councils
Hello and welcome to Adur & Worthing Councils' On-line Calculator App to help you find out whether your financial circumstances might enable you to benefit from a Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG) to adapt your home.
DFGs are only intended to benefit those on a low income who have a health based need for adaptation works to their home. Your health based needs are something which will need to be considered by one of West Sussex County Council Occupational Therapists and any grant funded works will be based on their recommendations. West Sussex County Council can be contacted via their Care Point number 01243 642121.
This Online Calculator App can tell you about your financial eligibility but does not consider your health based needs. It will estimate how much, if anything, you would need to contribute to the cost of a DFG to fund eligible adaptations to your home.
When you have confirmed your financial eligibility, it is important to remember to make contact with West Sussex County Council Occupational Therapists to start the process of your health based assessment (if you haven’t done so already).
The calculator needs to know about you, any partner, and about both of your income and savings. It also requires some basic information about other people living in your household but not anything about their financial situation. The way in which the calculator works is based on the Government’s Statutory Means Test and the rules are the same throughout England. The contribution which it calculates is the amount which people are considered to be able to self-finance e.g. by raising a loan. If a zero contribution is calculated, eligible adaptations could be entirely grant funded.
In addition to the national mandatory DFG policy, at Adur & Worthing Councils we have additional ways to support you using our discretionary policy e.g. we can cover some or all of the contribution which the Statutory Means Test requires. There will be more information about this later.
Information about the Calculator App (to help and reassure you).
It’s well worth taking your time and being as accurate as you can. The calculator will not close down however long you take. If you take a while to find the information, that’s fine. The system will wait for you. If you want to have a break, go ahead. Don’t feel you’re under any pressure to get it all done quickly. The chances are that it won’t take you long anyway. We’ve organised it so that we try not to ask irrelevant questions. If you’re not sure what a question means, or you want to know more about the tick-box answers, just click Tell Me More.
You’re welcome to skip a question and come back later. The system will give you a reminder that you haven’t answered all the questions on a particular page, so you can go back later when you have the information.
You might notice that we don’t ask anything about your name, address or anything else that could identify you. The answers are confidential, they’re for your personal use and they’re not shared with anyone. The same is true for the calculated result. For data protection reasons, you can’t save a questionnaire. Instead, when you’ve finished the questions, the system calculates the result and puts it in a neat document that you can download. If you want to, you can save it on your tablet, laptop or computer. It lists all the questions you’ve answered as well as a summary of the calculated contribution.
As you'll see when you've got the results, you can send us a copy of the results just by clicking a box.
Sharing the calculated results with us gives us an opportunity to give you further advice.
We currently have a discretionary policy to apply a standard waiver, removing £5,000 of the calculated contribution, which might be enough to make the adaptations affordable or to be entirely grant funded.
Where a person has a very high calculated contribution, have no savings to fund the adaptation and raising finance would be impossible, we can look at whether a further exceptional discretionary waiver might be appropriate.
Even if you do have to self-fund your adaptation works, we may have some advice to help you.
Thanks for using the calculator and we look forward to hearing from you.