The Equality Act: Option or Obligation?

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🔊 Listen to this

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Or: The passive optionalisation of the Equality Act 2010 and the need for proactive Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) compliance and enforcement.

By Carl Davis

The passive ‘optionalisation’ of the Equality Act 2010 within social housing is a subtle but dangerous form of regulatory failure. It occurs where laws designed to protect disabled residents are not outright dismissed, but are slowly eroded through a lack of enforcement, weak oversight, and a preference for landlord led discretionary approaches like voluntary vulnerability policies over legal obligations. The result is that conforming to equalities laws are considered an option, not an obligation.

The Housing Ombudsman has, time and time again, demonstrated a fundamental failure to prioritise the proactive enforcement of its Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). Investigations involving disabled tenants are frequently approached in a piecemeal and reactive manner, treating the Equality Act 2010 as an almost optional consideration rather than an underpinning legal imperative.

This approach allows landlords to practice and perpetuate non-compliance with impunity, fostering an environment where heavy-handed, dismissive, and often discriminatory behaviours become the norm rather than the exception.

The Need for Rigorous Oversight

Rather than taking a PSED-driven approach to investigations, the Ombudsman consistently fails to subject landlords to the kind of rigorous oversight that would deter misconduct. Instead, landlords remain smug in the knowledge that disabled tenants, who are frequently perceived as “unreasonable and difficult” for consistently raising legitimate concerns and asserting their rights, can be easily sidelined.

This is particularly evident in the way landlords weaponise contact restrictions, deliberately imposing Single Point of Contact (SPOC) arrangements to stifle legitimate complaints and isolate tenants forced to persistently challenge unfair treatment, poor housing conditions, or antisocial behaviour (ASB) because it’s never properly acknowledged nor dealt with.

The Ombudsman reluctantly acknowledges that SPOC misuse occurs but vastly underestimates or downplays the frequency of this abuse. Meanwhile, its adjudicators readily express sympathy for landlords resorting to these retaliatory measures, portraying them as justified responses.

Stock Responses

Yet any close reading across reports and decisions on the Ombudsman’s website shows these measures are now stock responses and the way landlords deal with disabled and non-disabled complainants who refuse to accept dismissive excuses provided in the short curt format the Ombudsman obviously prefers.

This reflects just how deeply the Ombudsman over-identifies with social landlords, to the point where the supposed “threat” and ‘harm’ posed by residents’ so-called “excessive communications” to a landlord’s operations is blindly accepted. There is no parallel consideration of the harm and distress caused to residents by the landlord’s obstructive and bureaucratic steps to negate, control and silence them.

There is a stark double standard at play. The implied harm to landlords from residents persistently seeking resolution and justice is taken for granted, yet the very real, often severe real world mental and physical harm inflicted on residents by landlords’ obstructive and retaliatory behaviour is ignored entirely as being beyond the Ombudsman’s scope.

There have been at least two suicides in such cases, one dealt with by the Ombudsman itself, that resulted from this treatment. There are likely to have been many more where a landlord’s crushing heavy-handedness has contributed to a death.

Boundaries and Barriers

The Ombudsman’s failure to challenge this asymmetry is deeply troubling. It reinforces a regulatory culture where landlords’ grievances are prioritised, while disabled tenants are treated as unreasonable and a nuisance, rather than an individual with legal rights.

The Ombudsman must put an end to landlords exploiting jurisdictional boundaries as a shield against accountability. The absence of joint investigative approaches between the Housing Ombudsman, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and other regulatory bodies creates regulatory blind spots that landlords actively manipulate to their advantage.

Landlords are skilled in providing different and often contradictory explanations to various oversight bodies and officials that residents turn to for help. They exploit this fragmented system to avoid scrutiny.

Many also leverage back channels or so-called ‘community partnerships’ to circumvent formal processes, to dispense with issues, or to achieve the outcome they want. Such practices not only erode transparency and due process, but leaves disabled tenants particularly vulnerable when key decisions affecting their rights and living conditions are made without their knowledge or input.

This systemic failure must be addressed through enhanced PSED-focused collaboration with other regulatory and oversight bodies, and a mandatory referral process when serious and persistent breaches of laws and regulations designed to protect residents are identified.
Jurisdictional boundaries shouldn’t offer sanctuary to those powerful social landlords who taunt residents’ attempts to hold them to account.

At present, they are confident that they can operate within and between jurisdictional boundaries with impunity. These practices reduce public confidence in, and inflicts reputational harm on, other public bodies and officials.

The General Data Protection Legislation (GDPR) – social landlords frustrating access to records, data breaches, and information injustice

Increasingly social landlords are weaponising personal data and information gathering, and record keeping to control, intimidate, and harass their residents. Clarion’s disturbing use of a predictive policing-style ‘risk to staff list’ serves as a threat. It implies that residents who persist in raising legitimate concerns have already been identified as a potential threat to staff and could find themselves flagged on this list should they persist in pursuing their concerns.

L&Q has been caught recording an ASB incident against a resident while simultaneously reassuring them that these records should not be seen as a negative reflection on the resident, claiming instead that this is merely an established internal administrative practice used to streamline and route messages to the correct department.

Beyond this, landlords routinely share disability-related personal data and now ‘vulnerabilities’ information on residents. The latter of which is so vague a term that it could easily cover anything the landlord decides it wants to share with third parties, including oversight bodies.

The ‘vulnerabilities’ label is used to legitimise not providing reasonable adjustments, as well as other forms of non-disability related support to residents, or to fulfil legitimate purposes. Instead, it is used to undermine residents’ credibility and manipulate case outcomes in the landlord’s favour.

We are increasingly finding that this extends to breaching data protection legislation by unlawfully sharing complaints data with third parties as a means of controlling the narrative, discrediting tenants, and avoiding accountability. This is done outside of any meaningful legal and ethical frameworks, resident-focused checks and balances, or any meaningful equalities-led scrutiny from the Housing Ombudsman itself.

This isn’t the world of Minority Report and Orwell, this is behaviour and practices being normalised in the Social Housing sector in 2025.

It is essential that the Ombudsman addresses these equalities-evading practices. They give landlords a green light to gather excessive information, and to snoop and spy on their tenants under the guise of seeking to identify landlord defined vulnerabilities. Such activity is often thinly veiled behind a claim that the landlord wants to support the tenant.

Scandal Driven Policy

Exposure of scandals ranging from the Post Office’s criminalisation of its sub-postmasters and post-mistresses, to the abuse of children in local authority care homes, show what can happen when the powerful are allowed to manipulate weak oversight.

Time and again we have seen such abusers exploit loopholes in the policies that should have exposed them, and embed themselves within the very systems meant to prevent harm. They captured the regulatory process, ensuring that those responsible for holding them to account instead looked the other way.

Social landlords have done exactly the same with the Housing Ombudsman. They’ve weakened its dispute resolution role, steering it away from enforcing rights and towards landlord-led voluntary policies that exist solely for their convenience.

This hasn’t just given landlords free rein to act as they please. It has actively eroded disabled residents’ legal protections and rights, turning the dispute resolution process into a tool landlords manipulate rather than one that holds them accountable.

The result? Public confidence in the Housing Ombudsman is in tatters. Instead of acting as a strong and independent watchdog, it has been reduced to a tame, house-trained service, only expressing outrage and yapping when the media shines a spotlight on serious landlord abuses.

The Ombudsman is not fulfilling its role of holding landlords to account, but opportunistically claims credit for what journalists have already exposed. The rest of the time, it serves as little more than a protective buffer for rogue social landlords, legitimising bad practice and subjecting disabled tenants to a hollow, performative complaints process designed to grind them down into passive acceptance and exhaust them silence.

And this failure doesn’t just harm individual tenants. It undermines the entire Ombudsman service, dragging its credibility into disrepute. The fundamental question now is whether the Housing Ombudsman even serves the public interest at all, or whether it exists purely to protect social landlords from meaningful scrutiny and weighty consequences they should rightfully face.

Similarly the Ombudsman’s failure to address jurisdictional decisions. A PSED-driven approach would require investigating, including jointly investigating with other regulatory and oversight bodies, the broader implications of a landlord’s conduct. Instead, critical aspects of cases are dismissed as being out of scope. The Ombudsman’s narrow interpretation of its remit allows landlords to sidestep accountability for discrimination, procedural abuse, and systemic failures in handling reasonable adjustments.

SHAC and Disability Visibility

SHAC campaigns against disability discrimination in the housing sector. See more on our Disability Visibility page.

5 April 2025

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