Poor data analysis harms equality work
Housing organisations are not properly monitoring the ethnicity of tenants and failing to stamp out discrimination, a study has found.
The Race Equality Foundation has published a paper looking at how local authorities and housing associations collect and analyse data.
It comes 40 years after a report first recommended ethnic records should be kept.
The report, Monitoring the ethnicity of housing service users: forty years of progress?, concludes: ‘Although ethnic record keeping of housing services has been recommended for forty years, it would appear that true monitoring (rather than mere record keeping) is in decline.
‘Collecting data on ethnic origin is, broadly, no longer seen as a problem. People have become used to providing such information.’
But report author Adrian Jones finds: ‘What seems to be missing is the regular and systematic analysis of the data that has been collected, and its subsequent reporting.
‘This could be due to conflicting or newly emerging priorities, changes in policies and key indicators, race equality being subsumed under a broader “equalities” banner and/or a lack of adequate time and resources.’
Director of health and housing at the Race Equality Foundation Ronny Flynn said: ‘Certainly, in different areas of housing there’s still discrimination going on on.
‘One of [our] other papers on disabled children in housing should shows that Bangladeshi and Pakistani families are over represented in poor housing if they have disabled children.’
She explained discrimination was often ‘institutional’ and ‘one of the ways of redressing it is being very clear about the people we are serving’.
Analysis of data would allow trends to be identified, such as if certain ethnic groups are over-represented on the waiting list, or in poverty and poor housing.
She explained people of certain ethnic groups would be at a disadvantage because they lack information on services available to them.
Although, she added: ‘Housing organisations are better now at employing staff from representative communities and working very closely in order to put information out there. There’s nothing like having a diverse work force to reach communities.’
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