ABSTRACT
Tenants’ associations in council estates have a long and poorly documented history. Associations are known to have formed in many estates in the interwar years, and there is some evidence that their number grew in the early postwar years as the council housing stock expanded. In the last twenty years, tenants’ associations are thought to have been formed on a larger scale than ever before, as the legal status and rights of tenants grew, and in particular as more local authorities supported their formation as a means of encouraging tenant participation in housing management. The growth in the number of associations was reflected in the formation of federations of tenants’ associations in many cities in the 1970s and 1980s; in the provision of grants and other resources by sympathetic local authorities; and in the establishment of organisations such as the Tenant Participation Advisory Services (TPAS) and the Priority Estates Project (PEP) to assist tenants to play a more influential role in housing management.
