However, as Section II pointed out, housing is an important component of wider efforts to promote social equity, and social equity is influenced by the ways in which housing delivery systems operate. As part of a broader set of measures therefore, housing policy can play a very useful role in combating discrimination, just as combating discrimination will make the housing process more effective. The job of policy-makers is to ensure that every opportunity is taken to use housing as a vehicle for promoting the equal rights of all people to the same standards of life. So housing policy must be sensitive to these differences and be clear about both the nature of the problem and the form of possible solutions. Exclusion in any form makes no sense when housing delivery is already so inadequate.
Housing needs all the help it can get.
A great deal more is known about the answers to this question in relation to gender than in relation to other disadvantaged groups, though at root the principles involved are the same and so are many of the policy options. The starting point has to be a recognition that different social groups have different housing needs and priorities - not that some need adequate housing and others do not, but that the details of tenure, design, construction, location and payment do change according to social characteristics and circumstances. Women and older children are the major drawers of water in settlements and take responsibility for most other domestic tasks too, so patterns of infrastructure and service-provision must be tailored to suit their requirements, and efforts to improve sanitation and environmental conditions must be sensitive to their roles and workloads. Many other examples could be given. The basic point they all illustrate is that housing policy which ignores issues of difference is simply poor policy - unworkable, unsustainable, and discriminatory in and of itself.