Okay…. time to admit: I asked this as a purely rhetorical question, as I already had fair certainty that there aren’t plenty of private lease deals around which are “like for like” better than the scheme, when all things are taken into account.
The only area I see the scheme being pretty poor is on the cheapest cars where you could literally privately lease for £100-£150 per month and then still have more than enough cash left over to fund the maintenance, insurance, etc.
Even then, you are still likely to be locked in to a pretty rigid contract, whereas I have experienced a situation where Motability have allowed me to change a car after just 13 months due to changing needs. In my case it was because my son (who is the DLA recipient) required a larger wheelchair which needed to be completely stripped down in order to fit in the boot. To be honest, I didn’t think Motability would permit us to change for this reason alone…but they did and even returned my AP (two-thirds pro rata).