Memorandum from Mr Bruce Birchall (DDB
37)
I would like to submit for the Scrutiny Committee's
consideration, some suggestions and ideas that would strengthen
the housing provisions of the draft bill and mean that disabled
tenants of Registered Social Landlords had meaningful equality
of access to housing appropriate to their needs and their impairments
as compared to general needs tenants. These suggestions arise
from the practice, analysis and thinking of the Tenants' Disability
Action Group an independent campaigning group of Notting Hill
Housing Trust tenants, of which I am the current chair.
PROBLEM
NHHT doesn't know how many disabled tenants
they have got, nor do they know how many flats suitable for disabled
tenants they have got in their housing stock. Thus they are unable
to plan what they need to do to reduce the shortfall in provision
over a given period, such as new disability Legislation may specify,
akin to the requirement to have all homes up to Decent Homes Standard
by 2010.
Disability is invisible and it has failed to
plan for the changing needs of tenants who were fit and young
when they housed them 30 years ago.
The Decent Homes Standard does not specify anything
that meets disabled tenants' needs, such that achieving a Decent
Homes Standard in all its homes by a RSL does not, of itself,
produce any more options for disabled people.
Thus disabled people will still have to pin
all their hopes on new-build homes. Whilst The London Plan will
require 100% of all new-build homes in London to be of Lifetime
Homes Standard in future, only 35% of 23,000 homes a year to be
built will be for Social Housing.
This situation is discriminatory. Imagine evacuating
wheelchair users from a burning building with only one lift. People
who can use the stairs will get out faster/be rehoused sooner.
SOLUTION
RSLs to be given two years to produce databases
which are mutually compatible with one another to assist in Choice-Based
Lettings Schemes on a regional basis being able to widen the range
of providers disabled tenants can look to for a transfer.
RSLs to have one further year to produce Action
Plans to rehouse all their existing disabled tenants who need
a transfer within five further years (eight years in all).
Co-operation between and joint planning by RSLs
to be encouraged.
A new Standard ("Enhanced Homes"?)
is needed, equivalent to the Lifetime Homes Standard, for older
houses, that means most categories of disabled people will now
be able to achieve appropriate housing within RSLs' existing housing
stock.
Inevitably disabled people who need conversions
with wider entrances or stairwells or load-bearing walls or ceilings
will not benefit from this new standard.
Legislation to be introduced to require 25%
of Decent Homes to be brought up to Enhanced Homes Standard by
2015 and 50% of Decent Homes to be brought up to Enhanced Homes
Standard by 2020.
PROBLEM
Registered Social Landlords use a concept of
"need" as regards the size of accommodation a household
needs, which does not take into account whether a member of the
household is a disabled person. This produces too-simplistic equations:
eg single person = 1 bedroom flat, which are discriminatory. The
disabled tenant is then not offered flats that are appropriate
to his or her needs, but pressurised to take less than they need,
to get a transfer within a reasonable time span or to get none
at all.
A disabled single person may need a live-in
carer or a rotation of sleepover carers, and thus an extra bedroom.
A powered wheelchair user may need garage space adjacent to their
home. Extra storage and cupboard space may be needed to house
the extra equipment that is needed because of their impairment,
eg a hoist, or medical supplies or specialist furniture needed
by district nurses who are effectively using the tenant's home
as a treatment room. Crucially disabled people may want to work
from home because of the difficulties of commuting to a workplace
and for self employment, the cost of two rents may be more than
a new business can sustain, especially if it is part-time work.
A related misperception of the needs of a disabled
tenant is embodied in the concept of under-occupation. Children
grow up and leave their parents' home and the child's bedroom
is defined as a "spare" room and tenants can he given
incentives to exchange "under-occupied" flats for smaller
ones. But the tenant may then need to offer a home to an aged
relative who is no longer able to live independently, or the tenant
mav become disabled and need carers.
The planning process will need to match the
increased availability of Enhanced Homes to tenancies with high
over-occupation levels.
Succession rights for live-in carers (who by
definition will tend to be more fit and healthy than the people
they care for and outlive them) could easily have the effect of
further reducing the number of homes suitable for disabled tenants
that are available to them.
Disabled tenants are particularly vulnerable
when there is an anti-social neighbour in the same house, as they
can be picked on, and feel intimidated. As it is hard to transfer
if you are disabled, there is an overwhelming sense of being trapped
in your home, unable to escape.
SOLUTION
The database as regards the tenant's needs has
to reflect the "extra requirements" of the onset of
disability, otherwise the real needs of tenants will be masked
by these oppressively limited definitions of need being imposed
on them. Planning to meet needs will be undermined if the needs
are under-estimated by inadequate definition of needs or inadequate
minimum standards being applied. DLA (Disability Living Allowance)
attempts to meet the extra costs of disability. A similar concept
of Disability Living Space Allowance is now needed.
Arguing by analogy. Disability Working Allowance
suggests a new concept of Disability Working Space Allowance is
similarly needed. This could cover both a tenant's own working
space and the working space of District Nurses and of carers within
the tenant's home. Where a tenant receives Direct Payments to
employ carers and does their tax and payroll himself, he will
need office space (a desk, filing cabinet, a safe) within the
home to do so. This too needs to be recognised with a higher Disability
Working Space Allowance.
A new concept of over-occupation is suggested
by this analysis: the extent to which the limited space available
is overstretched, by having to be multi-purpose and multi-tasking.
An amputee needing a constant supply of clean stump socks or a
tenant with a succession of rotating sleepover carers will have
extra laundry requirements and need a utility room, eg to reduce
his over-occupation and consequential stress to a managable level.
A tenant's need for extra space is the shortfall:
DLSA + DWSA— current space.
Succession rights for live-in carers who outlive
the people they cared for need not conflict with increasing disabled
people's access to suitable housing, if carers are re-housed to
smaller flats, releasing the larger one for re-letting to another
disabled tenant.
RSLs need to provide refuges for any tenant
to escape the menacing neighbour, while the RSL takes the necessary
steps to evict them but there is a particular need to provide
refuges suitable for disabled people so they can be rehoused quickly
when the need arises.
PROBLEM
Conservation Areas and Listed Buildings are
potentially problematic obstacles to achieving equality of access
to housing for disabled tenants. Only 17% of public buildings
have level access at ground floor level and the percentage of
dwellings with this feature is probably less than that. With an
increase in Buy-to-Let mortgages, more houses previously in single
occupation by owner-occupiers are being brought within the scope
of the draft Disability Discrimination Bill and a conflict between
planning legislation and disability legislation can be anticipated,
that will needs addressing, in an increasing share of the housing
market.
I raised this issue in a question to Maria Eagle
at the Disability Capital conference in Docklands on 13 December.
The CEO of the DRC confirmed this problem will exist when the
Bill becomes law. Maria Eagle replied that obviously we are not
going to demolish every building with steps and they will have
to be adapted. The DRC CEO then observed that he couldn't see
the point of Heritage fit wasn't for everybody.
At stake here is the principle that the functional
use of buildings must take precedence over an imposed concept
of their aesthetic appeal. Which could be taken as a charter for
ugly design, but in fact it is a challenge to combine skillful
adaptation to improve functionality with a subtly altered aesthetic
that is acceptable.
It is inescapable that the major obstacle to
non-specialist Housing Associations building and converting homes
suitable for rehousing their existing disabled tenants is the
way the homes are financed, leading to 100% of first lettings
having to go to Local Authority waiting lists.
Though 50% of second lettings may be offered
to existing tenants, the fact that so few people in social housing
in London ever leave that sector, because London's house prices
are so steep, means that the general problem for disabled tenants
who are already in social housing, of waiting years for a transfer,
will not be eased that much by 100% of new homes being built to
Lifetime Homes Standard. It will simply go to other disabled people,
not to them.
Though invited to contribute to the design standards
to be used on new-build schemes by Notting Hill Housing Trust,
our Tenants' Disability Action Group is thereby put in a piquant
quandary of helping others but not ourselves!
SOLUTION
The question of precedence when two laws are
in conflict should not be left to judges and magistrates to decide
on a case-by-case basis. It needs to be resolved by consequential
amendments to the older legislation when passing the new legislation,
messy as that is for keeping printed copies of the legislation
up-to-date.
But it isn't just planning legislation that
needs to be "trumped" by the draft Disability Bill,
it is individual planning decisions by local authorities and the
local planning guidelines that inform them. For example, where
I live, Kensington Housing Trust demolished 3 houses on the north
side of the square but the block replacing them was built with
steps to the front door, to harmonise with the rest of the square
(built c 1850)—perpetuating the problem of lack of level
access for another 150 years!
A lady of short stature moves in to the lower
ground floor flat and an external lift down to her flat from street
level has to be built, as she needs a powered wheelchair to get
about. It would have shown more foresight to have built the lowest
flat, flush to the street, in the first place, and this suggests
that Westminster needs to decree all new buildings, whether for
rent or for owner-occupation or for commercial use are built flush
to the street.
So the question is how a different financing
system can be devised that would enable RSLs to address the problem
of rehousing some at least of their existing disabled tenants
in appropriate new-build homes.
The John Grooms Housing Association in a recent
report argues 200,000 new homes are needed now to rehouse existing
disabled tenant of RSLs into suitable accommodation. With two
million homes in the social housing sector, this is a 10% expansion
that's needed "overnight". (This doesn't take into account
people who will become disabled and all the disabled babies who
are born whilst these 200,000 homes are being built.)
The size of the problem being that large, it
is best left to central Government and general taxation to fund
it. The question is: is there the political will? Having civil
rights to equal access to a suitable home need housing finance
to make it happen.
PROBLEM
Notting Hill Housing Trust has a policy that
disabled tenants get no special priority for rehousing unless
they are assessed as completely housebound. This policy is driven
by the shortage of suitable flats to offer as transfers, not by
it being the fair or appropriate treatment of those tenants' needs.
However, the disability discrimination bill
has as its starting point equitable treatment of disabled tenants
and, driven by this priority, it can be seen that this policy
is dicriminatory:
Two recent cases affecting committee members
illustrate this well: a wheelchair user in a 3rd floor flat in
a block whose lift breaks down constantly, and a woman born with
arms that only go down as far as her elbows, who was seven years
getting a ground floor flat with windows she could open and climb
out of if needs be—an unacceptable fire risk in both cases.
Land prices in London are expensive, causing
new-build schemes to be pushed in the direction of high rise and
high density. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister favours
high density solutions. This makes for difficulties as regards
a sufficiently large number of larger ground floor properties
being built.
Increased use of outsourcing and working from
home by firms wanting to save on office rents, which suits people
wanting to avoid commuting, plus banks developing callcentres
rather than pay High Street business rates will mean that a significant
number of commercial and office properties will no longer be needed
and can be reutilised or redeveloped. Homes will need to be larger
to enable home working and so Social Housing providers will need
to alter their concept of tenants' needs in the process, and disabled
tenants needs for extra space, too.
SOLUTION
The worst effect of not giving a priority for
a transfer to disabled tenants whose impairments place them at
greater risk in the event of a fire than non-disabled tenants
is the messages it sends out—their lives are not as valuable
as other people's if no special regard for their vulnerability
is shown. They are dispensable. Their sense of worth is undermined
and they are made needlessly anxious for their future.
The policy needs to be that tenants with mobility
impairments are not placed above the ground floor in the first
place. If London was built like Salt Lake City—long and
low—this would be easy to fulfill. So: what are RSLs to
do if they haven't got enough suitable flats? If the government
wants this bill to work, it will need to give RSLs the money to
acquire the extra flats.
The Habinteg Housing Association (who pioneered
the concept of Lifetime Homes) have produced a report showing
that high density schemes are not incompatible with the greater
square footage needed for Lifetime Homes; it needs some innovative
design solutions to achieve both aims at once.
This can be regarded as an opportunity and a
challenge not as a social problem. It releases property for conversion
for use as disability housing. We are living through a second
Industrial Revolution; the first released barns and farmhouses
as people moved off the land and into cities. The Information
Age now heads for the hills and cities get redefined in the process.
Shopping patterns are changing to out-of-town superstores and
"accessible housing" will need to include accessibility
of shops.
SUMMARY
Housing for disabled people will start to acquire
some of the characteristics of the pre-Industrial Revolution era.
What we presently think of as "independent living in the
community" is really no more and no less than a return to
pre-segregation pre-institutionalisation days; it is as though
we are emerging from a period of apartheid and learning afresh
the healing process of being accepted as equals.
The problem though is that reintegration is
having to occur in a housing stock not designed for independent
living, which embodies all kinds of architectural assumptions
about who would be living there 150 years later, which are inappropriate
to disabled occupants. And the residual consciousness of the segregation
period in our history still informs the way new-build schemes
are being designed, perpetuating the problem that our needs are
inadequately understood and insensitively met.
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