By Carl Davis
Social landlords increasingly use ‘vulnerability’ as the organising principle of their support frameworks. It sounds caring, progressive, human-centred. But in the topsy-turvy world of social landlords, this innocuous word becomes something else entirely.
Here, we offer a case study concerning Britain’s largest housing association, L&Q, showing how such sleight of hand works in practice. Their example is followed by many others.
Under L&Q’s Supporting Residents with Additional Needs policy (2024), vulnerability becomes a pathway through which to quietly subordinate disability-related legal duties under the Equality Act 2010, using an internal, discretionary, landlord-defined interpretation of ‘need’.
This isn’t an accident or an oversight. It’s a structural shift that changes the legal status of disabled tenants without ever saying so out loud.
Below, we set out the key ways this policy displaces statutory obligation with discretionary goodwill, and we offer a view on why this matters for the sector.
- The Equality Act 2010 imposes mandatory duties, not optional support
Under Sections 20 to 21 of the Equality Act 2010, landlords must make reasonable adjustments where a disabled resident faces a substantial disadvantage. This duty is:
- anticipatory (they must think ahead, not wait for crisis)
- proactive (failure to consider is itself a form of discrimination)
- impossible to delegate (contractors must comply too)
- continuous (must be reviewed and kept up to date)
- and enforceable (residents can take legal action)
Crucially, nothing in the Equality Act permits a landlord to replace or dilute this duty through internal policy. You cannot downgrade a statutory obligation to a preference, aim, or service adjustment. If a tenant meets the legal definition of disability, the duty exists whether the landlord likes it or not.
- L&Q’s policy reframes disability as one variant of ‘vulnerability’; a discretionary category
In the 2024 policy, disability becomes:
a type of vulnerability… on a spectrum… that may change over time.
That description fundamentally alters the legal meaning of disability. The Equality Act definition is fixed and rights-based. It is not a ‘spectrum’ determined by life events, digital literacy, income stability, pregnancy, bereavement, or staff perception.
Yet the policy mixes all these categories under a single term of ‘vulnerability’. By doing so, the policy shifts disability from a legally defined status with accompanying rights, to a service categorisation. This is the legal sleight-of-hand in which disability commands only a discretionary service response.
- The policy rewrites ‘must provide’ as ‘we will try where possible’
Throughout the policy, the legally binding language of the Equality Act is replaced with softer, landlord-convenient terms including
- We will aim to…
- Where possible, we will…
- Staff will be empowered to do the right thing…
- We may offer service adjustments…
None of these phrases exist in the statute. By contrast, the Equality Act uses directives including ‘shall.’, ‘must.’ and ‘required to’. Rewriting legal obligations as moral aspirations is a classic tactic of bureaucratic reframing. Once an obligation becomes an aspiration, failure becomes unfortunate, not unlawful.
- The creation of ‘service adjustments’ allows L&Q to downgrade legal adjustments
The policy creates a second category, that of ‘service adjustments’, which includes almost every common real-world disability-related adjustment. These include communication arrangements, accessible scheduling, safe contact methods, and timely repairs where disability makes delay dangerous.
By placing these steps in the service adjustment bucket (which is explicitly discretionary), L&Q gains full control over whether to provide them. This is where the subordination becomes explicit. A landlord cannot convert a statutory duty into a goodwill gesture by renaming it. Yet this is exactly what the policy does.
- Recording and sharing disability information becomes discretionary — but the law requires it
The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaints Handling Code (2024) is crystal clear:
Landlords must keep a record of any reasonable adjustments agreed, as well as a record of any disabilities a resident has disclosed. Any agreed reasonable adjustments must be kept under active review.
L&Q’s policy, however, says that records will be kept ‘where appropriate’, that staff should record ‘as needed, and that adjustments may be reviewed ‘if circumstances change’. By making record-keeping optional in this way, the landlord controls what counts as an adjustment. They can later claim that they had no record of the adjustment, or that an adjustment was temporary or informal.
Disabled tenants are caught in endless loops of being asked to restate their requests for the same adjustments time and again.
- The policy re-routes disputes into the complaints process instead of the legal framework
When a reasonable adjustment is refused, the policy tells residents to request a review, and then make a formal complaint to L&Q if they are still not happy. But the Equality Act does not require residents to exhaust a complaints process before asserting their rights. Nor can an internal complaints system replace statutory remedy.
By diverting Equality Act issues into a customer-service framework, L&Q again positions itself — not the law — as the arbiter of disability rights. This is a structural form of procedural gatekeeping.
- The overall effect: statutory rights become discretionary offerings
Taken together, the policy achieves the following:
- Diluting the legal status of disability into a broad, landlord-defined concept of ‘vulnerability’.
- Downgrading mandatory adjustments into optional ‘service adjustments’.
- Softening legal duties into aspirations.
- Giving staff discretion that the law does not allow.
- Framing compliance as a kindness rather than a legal requirement.
- Pushing legal disputes into its own internal complaint system.
This amounts to a quiet subordination of the Equality Act 2010 to an internal, landlord-controlled framework. In legal theory, this is known as derogation by policy, whereby a public or quasi-public body introduces an internal policy that has the effect of limiting or qualifying a person’s statutory rights.
- Why this matters for the wider housing movement
This is not just one organisation’s misstep. It reflects a broader trend in social housing to replace legally protected categories with softer, more malleable ones that place control back into the landlord’s hands.
The law is hard, whereas vulnerability is soft. Rights are fixed whereas vulnerability is fluid. Equality duties are enforceable whereas vulnerability duties are supportive and unregulated. This shift helps to make landlords look compassionate while simultaneously undermining the framework that gives disabled tenants enforceable power. It is structural erasure disguised as empathy.
See more on SHAC’s Disability Visibility Campaign.
The Need for a Housing Union
SHAC is working with campaign partners to establish an independent, democratic, national union run by and for tenants and residents. This would act as an equal and opposite source of tenant and resident power against the might of bad landlords.
Such a union would seek to end government endeavours to divide different categories of tenants and residents, applying protections to some and not others based on tenancy or landlord type, and conceding only to those with the loudest voices. We believe that this has been a factor in allowing the housing crisis to flourish.
A union on a mass scale will be able to unite renters, shared owners, and leaseholders. It will also be open to all, irrespective of their landlord, whether council, housing association, or private, and seek to address problems with managing agents. For more details, see here.
11 November 2025
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