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I feel the same way, I've been meaning to do a similar project for France for a long time, a sort of accessibility index for sidewalks that would be added to a weighted sum to give cities an accessibility score. I feel that's where projects like wheelmap fail since they only map buildings.

I don't know how it is in the UK but I'm not convinced by crowdsourcing in this case, there are so few of us and out of the few how many can be reached and convinced to participate. In most places I've worked or been to I've always been the only handicapped person there and most places I wanted to go to that I checked on wheelmap were not mapped. I feel a solution could be the automatic treatment of aerial photography like you get on google maps' highest zoom settings. It'd be somewhat easy to detect poles in the middle of sidewalks, broken sidewalks, tree roots, etc... and I feel it might be possible to estimate curb height and sidewalk steepness doing some clever processing. So far I'm stuck gathering data, I've found a government website with UK aerial data but was unable to download it and it seemed the coverage was very sparse. Either way I'd be interested in hearing more about your ideas and potentially collaborating even though I'm not in the U.K.

On a related note, I talked briefly with someone who worked in public infrastructure, particularly on "walkability" and he told me to look into Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS), that might be of interest to you.