By Carl Davis
The ongoing struggle for reasonable adjustments and the normalisation of adversarial landlord-tenant relations.
Securing reasonable adjustments remains an uphill battle for disabled tenants, largely due to landlords’ entrenched resistance.
According to the Housing Ombudsman’s Attitudes, Respect, and Rights report, 68% of tenants consulted reported that their landlords had refused to provide reasonable adjustments. This suggests a widespread failure to uphold legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010 , and reinforces the urgent need for stronger enforcement and accountability mechanisms.
Even when reasonable adjustments are formally agreed upon, their implementation is often delayed, inconsistent, or outright ignored. Landlords exploit procedural loopholes to dodge their obligations, often rebranding reasonable adjustment requests as ‘complaints’ to avoid treating them as enforceable legal rights.
This pattern of obstruction is particularly evident in cases where tenants have had to challenge landlords persistently over time. Landlords’ contractors have also followed suit. Larger regional or even national monopolistic providers like Surserve have been quick to incorporate landlord-led vague and generic ‘vulnerability’ approaches into their knowledge and information management systems and operations. This further strengthens the sense that reasonable adjustments are optional.
Disabled residents often face an uphill battle securing even the more simple and easy to provide reasonable adjustments or adapttions, assuming they get anything at all. It often involves protracted disputes withi retaliatory responses and behaviour from their landlords and their landlords contractors alike.
The process can stretch on for years. And even if disabled residents are begrudgingly offered reasonable adjustments or adaptions, they become in the eyes of the landlord permanently stigmatised, labelled as unreasonable and difficult or worse by their social landlords.
Weaponising Antisocial Behaviour
Echoes of this trend are also evident in antisocial behaviour (ASB) cases, particularly when they involve disabled residents. Landlords are reluctant to address ASB, and indeed can accuse the resident of displaying antisocial behaviour just because they have been persistent in requesting reasonable adjustments, repairs or action on ASB. This can cause relationship problems between the landlord and tenant that endure for years.
Rather than working to restore and normalise landlord and tenant relations, landlords tend to double down on adversarial tactics, refusing to normalise relations with disabled tenants who have been forced to fight for their rights.
The reluctance to rebuild trust demonstrates an institutional mindset that sees disabled tenants as adversaries rather than individuals deserving of respect and fair treatment. The Housing Ombudsman must intervene decisively in these cases, ensuring that landlords are held accountable for fostering toxic and exclusionary environments that disproportionately harm disabled tenants.
The Role of the Housing Ombudsman
One G15 repeat offender social landlord, along with its main gas and central heating contractor, has paid out a huge amount of compensation around failure to provide the same simple reasonable adjustment. Yet this same landlord has received the greatest possible understanding and sympathy from the Ombudsman which only awarded the landlord to pay £80 compensation.
Closer scrutiny would have exposed the sham of the vulnerabilities approach, not only as unworkable but manifestly legally suspect, and most definitely non compliant with its Equality Act 2010 Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED).
In other words, the Ombudsman knows the landlord-led voluntary and vague vulnerabilities policy approach makes it liable under the Equality Act. This approach is unworkable, unfit, and just wrong. The clock is ticking on the first legal challenge with the Housing Ombudsman and G15 aligned social landlords likely hoping that they can lobby lawmakers to weaken equality legislation or make compliance voluntary instead of mandatory.
The need for More Aggressive PSED-Driven Oversight
The Ombudsman has a duty to refer cases of harmful, discriminatory practices to relevant enforcement bodies, yet it consistently fails to do so. The current approach — where the Ombudsman claims it “cannot look at harm” caused by persistent, heavy-handed, and unfair treatment—must end.
What is needed is a fundamental shift in regulatory culture. There must be systemic attitudinal change, and there must be consequences for social landlords that repeatedly fail to meet their PSED obligations.
It is inconceivable that schools, universities, and workplaces would tolerate the level of neglect and mistreatment that disabled residents still endure in social housing. Yet, social landlords operate in an environment of near-total impunity, shielded by weak regulatory oversight and the Ombudsman’s reluctance to impose severe penalties for repeated failings.
Meaningful Penalties
A robust “three severe maladministration finding strikes around disability and you’re out” policy must be introduced. Under this model, if a social landlord receives three separate severe maladministration findings in relation to disability discrimination, or failure to comply with the PSED, the chief executive should be held personally accountable. Executive pay should be linked to an organisation’s ability to uphold the law. If a landlord repeatedly demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to learn, the chief executive should face dismissal.
The Role of Leadership: Holding the GI5 and Social Landlords Accountable
It is particularly worrying that the Chair of the GI5 group of large landlords, and L&Q boss Fiona Fletcher-Smith, herself a disabled woman, presides over some of the country’s most powerful social landlords. Many of these landlords are heavily implicated in efforts to dilute and undermine disability rights. The fact that disability is being systematically subsumed into voluntary vulnerability policies under her leadership is indefensible.
The voluntary approach is designed to minimise landlords’ responsibilities, reducing legal obligations to mere discretionary measures that can be withdrawn at any time. This is unacceptable. Smith is not prepared to flaunt the ‘vulnerable ‘ label in relation to herself. Nor is this label used by their own staff disability group. That said, disabled housing workers must also be alert to any reframing of their status to ensure their legal rights and protections as disabled people are not undermined in the social housing workplace too.
It is imperative that we see leadership from the Ombudsman that is PSED-driven and unflinchingly focused on accountability. Unfortunately, under its current leadership, the Ombudsman has instead opted for a performative and landlord-friendly approach in which an “investment in vulnerabilities” agenda has led to bureaucratic barriers rather than genuine enforcement of disability rights.
The resulting morass of red tape and procedural hurdles benefits no one except social landlords and legal firms like Devonshires Solicitors, who actively guide landlords in eroding tenants’ rights.
The urgent need for systemic reform
There is no doubt that the current regulatory framework is failing disabled tenants. The passive optionalisation of the Equality Act 2010 and the Ombudsman’s reluctance to prioritise proactive PSED enforcement have enabled social landlords to act with impunity. The result is a system that disadvantages those it was meant to protect while shielding those who perpetuate discrimination.
What we need is a decisive shift towards a model of regulation that places PSED at its core. This means:
- The Housing Ombudsman to be visibly Public Sector Eqiality Duty Led and fully EA2010 compliant.
- Leadership shake-up at the Housing Ombudsman to replace its current landlord-friendly approach with genuine mandatory oversight and enforcement.
- Joint investigative approaches between the Housing Ombudsman, ICO, and other regulatory bodies to prevent landlords from exploiting jurisdictional loopholes.
- Mandatory referrals to enforcement bodies when serious discriminatory behaviour is identified.
- Establish a Unified Monitoring Framework for Disability Rights in Social Housing.
Without these reforms, disabled tenants will continue to suffer at the hands of landlords who are empowered, rather than deterred, by the existing regulatory failings. It is time for change, and that change must start now.
16 April 2025
If you have a WordPress account, get notifications about new articles by subscribing below: