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South East landlord removes term ‘vulnerable’ from its policies
Eastlight Community Homes has stopped using the word ‘vulnerable’ to describe individuals or groups in its documentation, deeming the term a “meaningless” adjective.
Hattie Llewelyn-Davies, chair of Eastlight, said the move followed a consultation with residents and was designed to put them and “their individual needs at the heart of our decision-making”.
“To label someone as ‘vulnerable’ is to diminish them, because it suggests they are somehow fragile, incapable or lesser-than. It enables service providers to avoid putting in the work needed to understand how to empower individuals,” she said.
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“We need to move beyond using the meaningless adjective, ‘vulnerable’, to summarise an individual’s circumstances, or to unthinkingly put people who may have very different experiences into one homogenous group,” Ms Llewelyn-Davies said said.
From now, the 14,500-home landlord is planning not to use the term in its strategies, policies and communications, beginning with its customer service delivery strategy for 2024 to 2027, which is due to be published later this year.
Instead, Eastlight will use terminology to describe “specific disabilities and circumstances to better understand the challenges individuals may face”, rather than “language that could be detrimental to them”.
It hopes this will help the organisation better identify what work is required to meet residents’ needs and how its services can be adapted and improved.
“We know from experience that those who could be referred to as ‘vulnerable’ are the very people who have the most to contribute,” Ms Llewelyn-Davies said.
Eastlight was formed via a merger between Colne Housing and Greenfields Community Housing in 2020.
Since its inception, it has aimed to increase resident involvement through projects such as its ‘All In’ scheme, a community engagement scheme that began in June 2022.
For one year, the landlord paid 20 Essex residents – nine of whom were Eastlight tenants – a full-time salary and helped them to design and launch their own community projects to tackle social issues in the county.
The housing association is also planning to build more homes and recently raised £70m in a bond issuance to help it develop more than 3,000 new affordable homes.
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