‘If you look at where black people live, it’s the worst housing. You have to ask yourself, why?

Lord Victor Adebowale will never forget the moment he realised the importance of being able to choose where you live.

“Several years ago, I was showing officials from the then Department of the Environment around Canning Town. It was a summer day and we were walking past some low-rise maisonettes in quite a poor area. They needed a lot doing to them.

“Then we saw this child, aged about three or four, standing in his hallway with the door open taking a piss in the hall. I’ll never forget it. And I thought, my God, when people care so little about their surroundings because their surroundings care so little about them, it just becomes a toilet.”

Since the early 1980s, Adebowale, chief executive of social care charity Turning Point, has worked to make housing choice available to everyone. Last month he was appointed chair of an ODPM advisory group examining how allocation policies affect people from black and minority-ethnic communities.

The group, which will report to the government next July, will look at how to promote equality of access to housing. Its remit echoes a concern raised by Ted Cantle, chair of the Home Office community cohesion panel, in his report about the 2001 riots in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley. He said housing policies had directly contributed to segregation of the white and Asian communities.

“If you look at housing supply and where black people live, they just happen to live disproportionately in the worst estates and in the worst housing with low levels of employment. You have to ask yourself, why?” Adebowale says. “Then, if you look at the effect that poor housing has on people’s mental and social health, you also see black people disproportionately represented in the mental health statistics.”

Adebowale has spent 20 years in the housing and social care sectors but says he has not seen a significant improvement in the housing of BME communities in that time.

He started out as an estate manager at a London council in the early 1980s, and rose to become regional director of Ujima Housing Association and chief executive of youth homelessness charity Centrepoint. He was made a CBE in 2000 and a peer in 2001 – the same year he joined Turning Point. All before he turned 40.

Adebowale’s office at the charity’s east London headquarters is a modest room. He shares the space with a large mountain bike, but doesn’t get many chances to ride it. Sitting at his desk, surrounded by stacks of paper, he says he is always busy. It is testament to the importance he places on equality in housing that he has agreed to increase his workload by heading the advisory group.

Adebowale will be joined by Baroness Brenda Dean, the former Housing Corporation chair. She says: “I do think that Victor is the man for the job. He understands the issues. He knows about housing and how important it is for everyone, and how crucial it is that our BME citizens get decent housing. He also has the personality to get people working together. He might be a lord but he is not above the issues – his feet are firmly on the ground and he is leader.”

It’s not about black people having better choice than white people. It’s about fair, transparent and equitable choice

Adebowale is confident that his advisory group can come up with ideas to create such communities, and that the government will act on its recommendations. His one criticism is that other Whitehall departments aren’t doing the same work.

“Race impact assessment ought to be de rigueur in government policy,” he says. “Perhaps if it had been, we wouldn’t have some of the challenges we are now facing in the black community.”

One of the most controversial issues the group will tackle is choice-based lettings.

In May, an ODPM select committee recommended that the policy be abolished because it contributed to ethnic segregation, a concern Cantle himself expressed at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual conference in June.

But Adebowale finds this viewpoint hard to comprehend. He says the advisory group should not be about taking away choice, but making sure it is available to all. BME communities live in ghettos of poor housing precisely because they don’t have any choice.

“We already have a kind of segregation in housing by default. Just look,” he adds, pointing out of his office window to a grotty estate mainly populated by Bangladeshi families. “This group is trying to reverse some of that. We are looking at the disproportionate concentration of black people in poor housing and what can be done about it.”

Adebowale is keen to stress, however, that the group wants to create an equal system for all. “It’s not about black people having better choice than their white counterparts. It’s about having fair, transparent and equitable choice, so that we can have truly sustainable, mixed communities,” he explains.

So what would these communities look like? He ponders the question for a minute, then replies: “There are certain features that sustainable communities need, beyond good housing. One of them is accessible, well designed access to social care for the people who live there. The other is to live in an environment worth protecting because you feel it’s looking out for you.”