03 Aug 2023
At home with equality
The CIH Scotland Housing Awards are the highlight of the housing calendar, inspiring innovation and improving approaches. This year a new award, the Marion Gibbs Award for equality in housing, has been announced.
Inequality in the housing system in Scotland is a matter of fact.
While Housing to 2040 sets out the 20-year vision for a home for everyone, an accompanying briefing note summarises the range of ways that some of us are systematically disadvantaged due to factors including our income, our race, our gender, our age, and our health. Even our orientation, how we identify and express ourselves, exposes people to a greater risk of inadequate housing and homelessness.
These are the issues that Marion Gibbs cared about. She treasured her own happy home, which only strengthened her conviction in the fundamental role of good housing in all our lives. She was ambitious for the success of housing strategies she’d shaped, but also exceptionally grounded and close to how things look and feel to people at the sharpest end of housing inequality.
Marion’s housing career spanned posts in local government, third sector campaigning and network organisations, as a regulator, an expert consultant and since 2009 in Scottish Government. This brought an encyclopaedic knowledge that ranged from legislation and policy to the history of social housing, to contemporary methods of construction and the range of regulations. But most of all – an unrivalled ‘who’s who’ knowledge of the housing sector, and the broadest network of colleagues from across the housing world for whom she held the deepest regard.
Earlier this year, five of Marion’s friends and colleagues came together with the Chartered Institute of Housing to develop this new award to commemorate Marion’s commitment to equality and fairness and an outstanding life’s work advocating for progress. The Marion Gibbs Award for Equality in Housing celebrates projects, initiatives and organisations working to promote equality, diversity and inclusion and address housing disadvantages. Nominations for the award can be focused on changes within an organisation or on the services received by tenants.
Our hope, over the next few years, is for this award to contribute to building our collective confidence in talking about, and acting on, inequality in the housing system. And to create the opportunity to highlight the diverse communities we live in and the range of inspiring projects and practices to redress different forms of inequality that the housing sector is enabling.
Lorna Gibbs, Marion’s beloved partner, said:
“It would mean so much to Marion that her friends and colleagues have chosen to mark her contribution in this way. She would, of course, have claimed to be mortified as she was never one to claim credit, but she’d have secretly been delighted that her lifelong passion for and commitment to improving the lives of people in the most challenging of circumstances will carry on making a difference. Her legacy and her name live on.”
The Marion Gibbs Award for Equality in Housing is proudly sponsored by Homeless Network Scotland, Scottish Government, Queens Cross Housing Association, North Ayrshire Council and the Institute of Social Policy, Housing, Environment and Real Estate at Heriot-Watt University.
