There’s an unwritten rule in the housing sector that when race-related reports come out, you don’t question them; you just take the recommendations on the chin.

Race and housing is a complex and sensitive area, and any new report on it needs to be carefully considered. But last week’s report from Shelter Scotland and the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights – Systemic Racism and Scotland’s Housing Emergency – hit me as one of the more perplexing contributions to the issue.

Its headline findings can’t be argued with and make uncomfortable reading, for example:

• BME people are over-represented in the private rented sector, leaving them disproportionately impacted by high rents and shortages of adequate social housing
• And they are more than twice as likely to experience homelessness, compared to white Scottish/British people

In light of the report’s findings, a primary recommendation is that the Scottish Government should compel social landlords to publish an anti-racism policy to demonstrate specific actions towards anti-racism, and that the Scottish Housing Regulator should be compelled to increase its requirements on social landlords to demonstrate actions to address inequality.

However well-intended the report, it seems to me to be taking an incredibly challenging issue across the whole housing system and then homing in on the easy target of social landlords, who own less than a quarter of the nation’s homes.

Equality issues are rarely straightforward, and at GWSF we remain keen to support our member associations to explore what specific, practical steps can be taken to deal with some of the challenges – we’ve recently had an initial discussion with the Housing Diversity Network about working with them on this.

On access to housing, our members feel in a particularly surreal situation. They have Shelter telling them they need an anti-racism policy, but are regularly having to explain to long-standing housing list and transfer applicants why an increasing proportion of homes are being allocated to refugee and other homeless households.

Associations can’t, of course, influence the ethnicity of any homeless applicants, but we do know that at the current time, a significant proportion are refugee households. The ask from the homelessness service in Glasgow and elsewhere is for two-thirds of all lets: as few as 20% of lets go to housing list applicants these days, so there really isn’t a lot of control over who gets our homes.

Community-based associations will explain things to people as factually and responsibly as they can, but let’s not pretend that tensions don’t exist around this issue in our communities.

And our members continue to grapple with other challenges, such as how to recruit more BME people to the workforce and to the governing body. The solutions are rarely simple.

Having an anti-racism policy is all well and good, but homing in on the specific actions which are felt will make a real difference is the hard part: the report doesn’t really do this. It doesn’t spell out what specific things Shelter/CRER think social landlords are doing wrong and how exactly they think we should be doing things differently. What helps our members is opportunities to learn from others about different initiatives and what has worked well. What doesn’t help is just being told that they need to stop being racist.

What I do accept is that with BME people disproportionately disadvantaged by our broken housing system, if and when we’re able to start mending the system – not least through greatly increasing social housing supply – we must all work hard to ensure that existing inequalities across the housing system are, over time, addressed and not perpetuated.