ABSTRACT
Councillors have a formal authority as elected representatives in British local government which neither professional expertise nor citizen involvement can usurp. Yet tenant participation—and other forms of citizen involvement—provides just such a challenge; and councillors themselves had often initiated the new relationships developed with tenants in our case study consumerist and citizenship authorities. This chapter starts to explain this apparent paradox by considering how councillors see their role and the implications this has for their relationship with tenants and housing managers. We later return to the nature of the relationships involved in tenant participation in Part III, where an analytical framework for power is used to consider the puzzle of how councillors’ relationships with tenants and housing managers can deviate from the traditional representative model.
