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Birmingham Council’s allocation policy unlawfully discriminated against disabled people, High Court rules
Birmingham Council’s policy for allocating social housing unlawfully discriminates against disabled households, the High Court has ruled.
A judgement handed down on Tuesday said the policy effectively imposed a “blanket ban” on disabled families without children being able to bid successfully for adapted homes, amounting to indirect discrimination.
The case was brought forward by Habibo Nur, mother of Zakiya Abdulahi, who is 28 and has cerebral palsy and learning difficulties, meaning she requires full-time care.
Ms Abdulahi requires what deputy judge David Lock QC described as “standard” and “relatively modest” adaptations to her home, such as a level-access shower, stairs with bilateral handrails and a downstairs toilet.
Having been given an unadapted council house in 2019 after being made homeless by a private rented sector eviction, Ms Nur spent 18 months bidding for council homes advertised as being suitable for a disabled person through the Birmingham Council’s choice-based lettings (CBL) system.
But all her bids were unsuccessful, with some “skipped” by housing officers even if she was the highest priority applicant because of a council policy to give preference to households with children for houses.
Every home advertised as adapted that appeared on the CBL system during Ms Nur’s searches was a house, meaning the high demand for houses from families with children rendered it effectively impossible for her to bid successfully.
Lawyers for the council had argued that Ms Nur could have bid for unadapted homes and requested them to be altered to fit her daughter’s needs, but the judge pointed out that no information was given to bidders about this being possible and questioned whether it would have happened in practice.
Ms Nur’s predicament left her family at a “particular disadvantage” but was “almost certainly relatively common”, he suggested, with disabled people more likely to live in a non-children household.
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The family was eventually offered an adapted home in September last year, which they moved into in December, but Mr Lock suggested this was “for the purpose of seeking to avoid this trial”.
“Indeed, it seems likely that if she had not brought these proceedings and been offered a house outside of the bidding system, she would still be submitting weekly bids for adapted properties,” he added.
Birmingham Council agreed its allocation policy in 2014 and brought it into force in 2017, failing to fulfil a promise to carry out annual reviews to check for inequalities and inefficiencies.
The council has therefore “been operating a scheme for the past four years without knowing whether, in practice, the scheme achieves the objectives which were set out when the scheme was launched or has unintended consequences”, the judge said.
While accepting that the discrimination was “wholly unintentional”, he concluded that “the council ought to have appreciated that its policy of giving preference to households with children was likely to be adversely impacting on disabled households throughout the city”.
It was unable to provide the court with any documents about how housing officers were supposed to interpret the policy beyond the policy itself.
Birmingham Council was ordered to pay damages to Ms Nur and is now reviewing the policy.
A spokesperson the council said: “Birmingham City Council takes its duty to provide suitable accommodation to disabled tenants very seriously.
“There is a chronic housing shortage nationally and, as with most other local housing authorities, this has resulted in extreme difficulty in us sourcing suitable accommodation.”
Ms Nur’s legal challenge was heard in two parts, with a previous judgement handed down in December ruling that the council had misunderstood its own allocations policy in her case specifically and criticised it for a “failure to engage” with the court proceedings.
In a separate case, the High Court recently ruled that Birmingham Council was operating an unlawful temporary accommodation system that left families in inappropriate housing for long periods of time while it looked for permanent homes.
The council is appealing the judgement and said the case “raises important issues which are pertinent to all local authorities”.
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