HOUSING
looked at access to advice, but the small sample included a range of ethnic minority communities, not just migrants. Although they sought to interview significant numbers of young people (and some older ones) the report did not identify any specific problems or discrimination faced by different age groups. One informant cited religious discrimination as a factor, but this was then identified as a cultural barrier in the report. There are no references to sexual orientation in any of the work on housing and migrants studied so far. It is identified as a particular difficulty in terms of collecting data by workers with migrants, who report a reluctance by staff to ask the question and by service users to answer it. 7.5 Conclusions There is little available data that provides a reliable picture of housing conditions, pathways, decisions and outcomes for migrants. The available statistical data is partial, and does not tell us about the axes of discrimination, with the possible exception of race, with some information about nationality or country of birth. Research is similarly patchy, much of it focused on Eastern Europeans, and saying little about gender, age, disability, religion or sexual orientation. The available figures and research point to likely discrimination in both the social and private sectors, and anecdotal evidence indicates similar problems in housing associations. The outcome is, as reported in various pieces of research, that many migrant communities live in very poor, insecure and overcrowded conditions.
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