Property as an industry prides itself in placing people at the heart of what it does. But in many cases, it falls short in creating places that can be enjoyed by everyone. People with disabilities face accessibility barriers every day.
According to Transport for London, less than a third of the 270 Tube stations across the capital are step-free. Only a third of homes have doorways wide enough for wheelchair access, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and more than 80% have steps or some sort of obstacle between the pavement and front door.
If people with disabilities have been overlooked by the property industry, how can companies start to ensure they are creating places with everyone in mind – a well as building a truly inclusive workforce?
Bringing new insight
A key part of the solution is increasing the number of disabled people in the industry’s workforce and ensuring their insight is incorporated into placemaking decisions. Savills’ UK chief executive James Sparrow says getting disabled people into the workplace provides numerous business benefits, bringing a “unique and valuable insight” to real estate.
“Combining different experiences not only creates a more inclusive and varied environment, but also generates better solutions and practices and it is therefore crucial that we have the right platforms and support in place to encourage this,” Sparrow says.
Ginny Warr is British Land’s head of procurement and chairs the company’s disability network, Enable. She says inclusion is key to “achieving business growth and sustainable success”, but that property needs to talk more about these benefits.
“As a sector, there is a huge amount for us to learn,” she adds. “The important elements of this are starting a conversation, raising awareness and building engagement.”
When British Land set up Enable last year, Warr says, the goal was to raise awareness and ensure the REIT is “disability smart” in its decisions. Since then, the company has made changes to better support people with disabilities, particularly as the pandemic has forced more of its employees to work from home.
This month, British Land launched an inclusive technology guide allowing employees to access functionalities and settings to best support them as they work online. Supporting staff while they work remotely will remain important for businesses if the homeworking trend continues after the pandemic passes, Warr says.
Removing barriers
Mike Adams, chief executive of disability charity Purple, is concerned about the impact of the pandemic on disabled workers in real estate. The charity, which has worked with organisations including the British Property Federation to raise the profile of disabled people in the industry, worries that people with disabilities will be worst hit as unemployment rises and redundancies increase.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 314,000 people in the UK were made redundant in the three months to September, a record quarterly figure. And in real estate, many firms have had to make staff cuts as a result of the financial and business impacts of Covid-19.
“I have a real concern that disabled people might be the first out of the door when redundancies are being made, and may not be the first back in the door as we come through the recovery,” Adams says.
“There is a perception that disabled people are costly because of the reasonable adjustments that they make.”
But that concern is unfounded, Adams adds. Purple estimates the average reasonable adjustment cost per employee is around £180.
Adams says that real estate, like many other sectors, must do more to ensure that people with disabilities have access to the same opportunities as other colleagues.
According to Equality and Human Rights Commission research, disabled people in employment face a pay gap compared to non-disabled peers, which stands at 13% for men and 7% for women. People with disabilities are also less likely to hold senior leadership positions: only 8% of managerial roles are occupied by people with a disability, according to the charity Scope.
Adams says companies need to be proactive in investigating any pay gap in the business. “It is incumbent on every organisation to look at the pay of their staff, and where there is identified disabled staff, look at the comparative numbers to see if there is a pay gap is and why,” he says. “I think there are some really searching questions [needed to be asked] in the same way that organisations have been forced to [answer around] the gender pay gap. It’s just not acceptable in 2020.”
Critical perspectives
Once the industry has stepped up efforts to encourage people with disabilities into the sector and remove career barriers, the new perspectives that could be brought to design and placemaking should be valuable. This could be particularly beneficial in creating more accessible homes.
The Centre for Ageing Better is one of 10 organisations across the housing and charity sectors that last year formed a coalition – Housing Made for Everyone, or HoME –to tackle the “growing shortage of accessible homes in the UK”. According to MHCLG statistics, only 7% of homes in England are accessible.
Senior programme manager for homes, Henry Smith, says developers are “falling way short” of delivering accessible homes, and that people with disabilities need to be included in the design and consultation process in the delivery of new homes.
“It’s absolutely vital that people from all ages, all abilities, are properly engaged with in the development process,” Smith says. “It can sometimes be a bit of a tick-box exercise [in] consultation.”
The HoME collation wants the government to put a mandatory requirement on the delivery of accessible homes across the UK’s local authorities. At present, some local authorities might have higher minimum standards than others.
The government has a perfect opportunity to level the playing field: it is currently consulting on proposals to raise accessibility standards so all new homes in England are built to better meet the needs of older and disabled people.
“Developers really want more certainty on policy,” Smith says. “They want a level playing field, whereas at the moment they have a postcode lottery of different requirements in various parts of the country, and where there is policy it is open to the art of viability discussions.
“The impact is that developers are able to buy land at the cheapest price based on the knowledge that they can negotiate out those requirements. So these types of public interest outcomes, such as the accessibility of housing, get squeezed out.”
Housing association Habinteg is also part of the HoME coalition. Its director of strategy and external affairs, Nic Bungay, says that a developer mindset shift needs to occur.
“We should be much more ambitious and visionary in the types of homes we are building,” he says.
“Sometimes there are some myths around the cost – there may be a perception that accessible and adaptable homes are much more costly to build,” Bungay adds. But the numbers don’t stack up: according to government figures, it would only cost an extra £521 to build an average three-bedroom semi-detached house to accessibility standards with a further space cost of £866-£1,387 per home.
Creating more accessible homes could have a huge knock-on effect on the economy, says Centre for Ageing Better’s Smith. People with mobility issues, such as elderly people, may get injured if their home is not fit for purpose, but if more homes are made accessible, this would alleviate cost to the NHS, which has to treat those who are injured.
“It’s a massive cost on the NHS – £1.4bn per year – in [relation to] homes that are not suitable and affect people’s health,” Smith says.
The business case is clear for creating inclusive places and workforces. It is up to real estate to prove that it really does put every single person at the heart of what it does.
To send feedback, e-mail lucy.alderson@egi.co.uk or tweet @LucyAJourno or @estatesgazette
