Voice box

Somewhere in England live 26 tenants who could become the most powerful in the history of the English tenant movement. The only problem is that no one - including the tenants themselves - knows who they are yet.

In his 2007 review of social housing regulation, Professor Martin Cave recommended forming a new organisation to give tenants a voice at a national level. Two years later, the search for its members has begun in earnest.

At the heart of the National Tenant Voice will be a 50-member national tenant council, with an annual £1.5 million budget, also funding the set-up costs, from the Communities and Local Government department. Twenty-four spots are reserved for nominees from existing national tenants groups; the remaining 26 will be selected from the millions of English social housing tenants.

It appears to be a huge opportunity - but delays and a lack of information on the NTV’s progress have caused confusion and suspicion among tenant activists, as readers’ responses to NTV stories on Inside Housing’s website suggest. ‘You could throw £50 million at the NTV and it would make no difference,’ reads one post.

‘It’s a complex project - that’s why rumours have begun,’ suggests Richard Crossley, tenant empowerment advisor to the CLG and member of the NTV project group tasked with getting it up and running. Now, with the search for those 26 council members in full swing, it’s time, as he puts it, to get the right information out there.

The recruitment brief is daunting. The 26 applicants must represent as closely as possible the geographic, ethnic and tenure mix of English tenants - including those who have never been involved in tenant activism before (see box: recruitment issues). ‘This is unprecedented,’ admits Matt Lewis, business director at Hays Social Housing and the man directing the recruitment process.

It follows that nobody is quite sure what to expect. According to one activist, many English tenants are still, at time of writing, unaware the NTV exists. ‘When I talk to tenants, I ask - how many understand the NTV?’ asks Jimmy Devlin, chair of North West Tenants and Residents Assembly. ‘Some people still haven’t heard of it.’

His concerns do not end there. Mr Devlin is among those who worry that the new body may end up disempowering tenants by simply rubber-stamping government policy. ‘Is it to tick a box?’ he asks. ‘That is my concern. There is a lot of apathy floating about [among tenants]. I’m worried that all this might be meaningless.’

So what is the truth behind this proposed organisation - and what will the NTV actually do once it is formed? How will Mr Lewis and his team get their recruitment message across? And can all those involved counter apathy and cynicism among tenants more used to feeling shouted down than listened to?

Information gap

Information on the NTV’s progress has been limited. Based on the timetable released by the CLG in January, it is behind schedule - the fully appointed council was supposed to meet for the first time this month. ‘If you ask the average tenant how the NTV is going, they won’t know,’ says Mark Soundie, chief executive of Tenants and Residents Organisations of England, one of the organisations that will appoint members to the council. ‘There’s no website, no newsletter… people expected it would be in place by now.’

Mr Crossley is happy to hold his hands up to this. ‘We could have done more to get the information out,’ he admits, ‘but we wanted to get the right information out.’ Fine - so what will the NTV actually do?

‘The purpose of the NTV is to enable social tenants to influence policy and practice at a national level,’ he says. ‘It will put forward policy proposals and it will lobby government.’

The national tenant council will be at its heart. From the 50, the accountability committee (see box: recruitment issues) will appoint nine members to a board, which will look after staff recruitment and the NTV’s accounts.

Mr Crossley dismisses the suggestion that it will simply rubber-stamp policy, but makes the point that its influence is not guaranteed, and like any other independent body it will have to win its spurs.

‘It has no statutory basis - the government can choose whether to listen to its proposals or not. It has to earn its right to have influence - which will be governed by how good it is at representing the views of tenants. ‘We have to make the NTV as effective as possible so that we can’t be ignored. We have to make it a dynamic and exciting organisation that will make an impact.’

That will come down to its tenant members - and so, in part, to those charged with recruiting them. That search has already begun, but the rumour that all 26 must be newcomers to tenant activism is not true, Mr Crossley says. ‘We’re not excluding any tenants,’ he says firmly. ‘We want to encourage applications from everyone.’

Reaching everyone is a different matter. Hays plans to use its network of professional contacts across the sector, particularly the tenant engagement teams of social landlords, to spread the word. The CLG will call on tenant organisations to do the same. And while he recognises a level of scepticism among tenants, Mr Crossley expects plenty of interest.

‘People have a natural cynicism, but at the road shows [run by Tenant Participation Advisory Service in the spring to publicise the NTV] there has been huge enthusiasm for it,’ he says.

TAROE chair and tenant Michael Gelling concedes tenant groups can’t shout as loudly as they’d like to. ‘There’s no tenant organisation in this country that is on an equal footing with any landlord body,’ he says.

The NTV still won’t match the collective resources of the likes of the National Housing Federation and Chartered Institute of Housing, he adds. But he’s confident in its potential to close the gap over time.

‘As long as any future government supports the principles that this government is supporting with the National Tenant Voice I’d say it’s got a good chance to develop into something really good.’

People power

National influence means representation, which for NTV organisers has meant at least one major compromise. The rumour mill has been right about one thing - the selection of council members will remain undemocratic.

‘We had a lot of debate about that,’ Mr Crossley says. ‘There are millions of tenants out there. How do you hold elections that would involve everyone? It would take most of the NTV’s resources and time to do that. And we wouldn’t necessarily get the diversity profile that we are looking for - the council wouldn’t be as effective without that profile.’

In fact, he is adamant that the new body - and the process by which it is formed - will cleave to Professor Cave’s original vision. Time will tell. The challenge now is to make sure as many English tenants as possible agree. More than 26 of them, anyway.

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