We Challenged the Housing Sector: Here’s What Happened…
On 15 June 2023, a Housing Race Summit was held by BRIG six years on from the horrific Grenfell disaster and the tragic death of little Awaab Ishaak, whose death was directly linked to exposure to damp and mould and it is our view that racism was contributing factor.
Together with the President of the Chartered Institute of Housing, Lara Oyedele who gave a challenging State of the Sector address, the summit held robust and honest discussion about what social landlords and local authorities can do to ensure housing is anti-racist. It’s clear that action from landlords, which have a huge amount of power and sway on the lives and livelihoods of the communities they serve, is so desperately needed.
The barrister who represented Awaab Ishak’s family, Christian Weaver gave a compelling and heartfelt account of how race played a part in the way the family was treated. I mentioned in my opening speech how the Housing Ombudsman reported a culture of ‘othering’ residents lay at the heart of Rochdale Borough Council’s issues, which involved a pattern of exclusion and marginalisation based on identities perceived as different. This was to me, politely stopping short of using the term racism.
The way that Awaab and his family were treated is not isolated or rare. In 2022, the Heriot-Watt University Report into racial bias in housing found that one in three Black people who experienced homelessness also faced racial discrimination from a landlord - six times that of the general population. This report comes 60 years after Windrush renters reported seeing signs for homes to let with ‘no coloureds’ or ‘no Blacks’ – a sad indictment of how little has changed.
All this follows the Grenfell Tower disaster in 2017, subsequent inquiry, and the Social Housing Green Paper aimed at “rebalancing the relationship between residents and landlords” and the Social Housing Regulation Bill, which forms the legal basis for many of the reforms in Social Housing White Paper that is still going through parliament!
The overwhelming conclusion of the summit was that the pace of change is slow and, in the meantime, lives are disproportionately impacted, even lost, by failings within the housing sector.
Nikki Sinclair from RSM made it clear that the representative make-up of boards and senior management remains inadequate and that systemic transformation is needed. This can only happen where communities and employees are represented on boards, committees and panels, and have the means to hold leaders to account.
Attendees and contributors had open, insightful and at times painful reflection on the state of the sector. Landlords looked deeply at what they do and how.
Our expectation is that the sector will adopt the BRIG manifesto and the recommendations that arose from the summit in relation to the tenant voice, racism and the cost of living crisis, health and social inequality impacts within housing, the role of the housing sector in eliminating racial inequalities and to consider peer review recommendations from other housing sector leaders, including chief executives, council leaders and equality, diversity and inclusion leads.
We want social landlords to take up the BRIG Boards Diversity Challenge, adopt the Race Equality Code and engage with the position paper that will arise from the summit such that social landlords to shift the dial within the next the 10 years, in three-year increments, in tackling racial disparities within social housing.
Only with actions like this, that run from board and executive management to employees to customers, a commitment to being actively anti-racist and working with other sectors, such as health, the police and the climate sector, can social landlords ensure that all people are able to live flourishing lives in places that are decent enough for them to have a chance at thriving
