How ESG reporting can support accessibility

Disability is an area where our sector is relatively silent. Could ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting enable current and future disabled customers to have better homes and services?

Overall, the sector has made progress with many areas of the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) agenda. But, during my time in various roles with housing providers, I haven’t seen disabled households significantly benefit from this work.

Over the last year, disability advocate Millie Hawes, Professor Vikki McCall and I have attended a number of conferences and spoken at regional meetings for the National Housing Federation (NHF) and other housing groups which focus on EDI. We also hosted a roundtable, titled “Discrimination by design?”. The name in part reflects Professor McCall’s ongoing work with I.S.P.A. (Intersectional Stigma for Place-based Ageing), but it’s important to note that disability affects all age groups and households, at any time. It goes beyond our traditional focus on aids and adaptations (A&A) for older people.

Our aims for this work have been to:

• Raise awareness – challenge the silence around disability in the sector.
• Identify good practice and establish how to share this more effectively.
• Seek opportunities to collaborate – improve coordination within and between housing providers, as well as with other stakeholders engaged with the sector like suppliers, health professionals and charities.

Disability inclusion in the social housing sector

The latest results from the NHF’s EDI data tool clearly illustrate the underrepresentation of disabled people across the sector workforce when compared with our customer base. So, it is no surprise that the agenda is missing from our strategic and operational discussions. Meanwhile, the statistics relating to disability in the UK are striking:  

• There are 14.6 million disabled people in the UK.
• Life costs, on average, £583 more a month for disabled people.
• Only 5% of homes can be visited by a wheelchair user.

Millie’s experience of our sector, both as someone seeking a suitable home and as an advocate, has been no better than the experience of many disabled people living in the private rented sector. On occasion, the lack of understanding about the needs of disabled customers has been painfully stark. Inclusion work in the sector often suffers from a lack of joined up thinking and organisational dead-ends. Disability has long been left to specialists and is seldom considered a mainstream topic.

What can we do to change this?

As we have seen with the much-improved approach to mental health awareness across the sector, simply sharing experiences can make positive changes to culture, strategy and service delivery. Why not do the same for disability? Particularly if representation levels are likely to continue to be a challenge.

As board members, I would encourage colleagues to ask what is being done to support our disabled customers across:

• Design and build strategies and ongoing development of new homes.
• Repairs and maintenance service delivery, including retrofit, empty homes and aids and adaptations.
• Customer insight and support.
• Governance, our overall strategy, EDI, communications, procurement, social value and performance reporting.

I am a keen advocate for the sector’s approach to ESG via the Sustainability Reporting Standard (SRS). In my view, the SRS helps to identify gaps in our strategic narratives, and therefore could do the same for our approach to disability. The summary from our ‘Discrimination by design?’ roundtable provides potential criteria which could improve the experience of disabled people across the sector. For example, in relation to new build and retrofit homes: ‘sustainability must consider accessibility’. This would present an interesting value for money challenge which is often overlooked in new build, retrofit and empty homes as well as in planned maintenance policies. Applying and influencing current SRS criteria should help us to proactively share and implement better practice and collaborate more effectively to raise standards, reduce costs and attract more finance. Most importantly, it can help us ensure that our current and future customers benefit from better homes and services.