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Back when I first got involved, 20 years ago, there was a simple answer as to why Supported and Sheltered Housing schemes had a relatively low percentage of Black and Minority Ethnic residents. We told ourselves that “they” looked after their elderly and needy relatives much better than “we” did.

Residential Care homes in particular were a symptom of the collapse of the family; we were providing a safety net to mitigate the failures of Western society. It was a seductive argument, because it both justified the status quo and assuaged the liberal conscience: How could we be racist if we were comparing our own ethnic group unfavourable with others?

Two decades on there is still serious under representation of Black and Minority Ethnic service users in parts of the Supported Housing sector. And the defence follows remarkably unchanged lines; providers have good diversity policies in place, and if Black and Minority Ethnic clients don’t come forward, it must be that their needs aren’t as acute as some other ethnic groups�. It’s not good enough.

The National Housing Federation’s “In Business for Neighbourhoods” initiative tells us that we are not mere safety net providers. We offer genuine choices, and quality services, that enhance the lives of individuals, households and the places where they live. We work amongst those who cannot achieve those outcomes from the private market. The Stephen Lawrence enquiry came up with the succinct and invaluable (if controversial) concept of “institutional racism”; a term that captures the way in which systems and structures fail to engage evenly across the racial mix even if all the individuals within them are committed to fairness and justice.

The late twentieth century approach that still underpins much social housing provision presumes that everyone is the same, or that differences such as culture and religion can be relegated to some private sphere that need not concern us. What Lawrence and iNBiz together tell us is that if we’re not providing the sorts of Supported Housing services that meet the needs and aspirations of the diverse races that form our society, the responsibility lies with us not somebody else. It’s not an individual fault, but a major flaw in the way our institutions function.

Were we running a fast food outlet and discovered that we had few Black and Minority Ethnic customers we would at least ask ourselves whether the produce range needed changing, or the decor of our establishment or maybe our opening times. My suspicion is that as Housing providers we simply stick a few more black faces on our brochures and hope that does the trick.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s in a part of British society with the greatest overt racism, prisons, that I have seen some of the best efforts in recent years to tackle the institutional factors. Perhaps it’s our very ‘niceness’ that blinds us to our persistent failure at institutional level. But, whatever the reasons, it’s time for Supported Housing to get its act together.