ABSTRACT
The aim of this book has been to investigate the tenants’ movement of England and to articulate its distinctive voice. In the place of an autonomous social movement it has found a fragmentation of loosely networked organisations, dependent groups and disparate individuals whose collective action is channelled into partnership with social landlords and absorbed in the intricacies of participation in housing management. The influence of tenants’ organisations in government policies or housing policy discourse more broadly is almost non-existent. The crisis of housing supply and affordability, the promotion of price inflation in homeownership, the expansion of the largely unregulated private rented sector, and the reduction in the security and status of social housing all advance to the accompaniment of little political agitation. Those who castigate the tenants’ movement for its failure to build a sustained political programme have advanced no convincing strategy for how the conditions for radical social change might be engendered through housing and community action (Dickens et al. 1985). The action-image of a confrontational tenants’ movement has proved an illusory framework to judge the effectiveness of locally based organisations that seldom demonstrate such opposition to authority. In contrast to the European social democracies, the tenants’ movement of England has demonstrated only rarely the ability to co-ordinate national political action, reflecting the marginalisation of the social housing sector from housing policies promoting a dominant market bias. Contrary to the other Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, however, the significance of the size of the social housing sector in England, particularly prior to its partial privatisation in 1980, has deeded the tenants’ movement in England with a palpable social base, and the substantial contribution made by social housing to the aspirations and well-being of generations of working-class households has bequeathed a weight of values and traditions that constitute the English tenants’ movement as a unique social movement.
