View tenants’ rights in context

Council tenants won security of tenure in the Labour Housing Bill of 1979 and the Conservative Housing Act of 1980. This landmark gain was, like all major housing policy gains in British history, a result of sustained activism, tenant organisation and negotiation, and direct action such as demonstrations and rent strikes.

The 1970s saw a range of protests against rent increases and the poor quality of many homes built in the 1960s. In 1968 parts of the Ronan Point tower block in Newham collapsed as the result of a gas explosion, killing four tenants. Hundreds of local residents organised a petition which read: ‘Under present conditions we will flatly refuse to leave our present slums to enter new slums.’

Tenant organisations over the next 20 years campaigned to defend tenants against the effects of this ‘great British housing disaster’. Tenants reacted to these ‘new slums’ with campaigns on dampness and condensation, asbestos removal, fuel debts, security and social amenities.

In its 1972 Housing Finance Act, the Conservative government introduced much higher ‘fair rents’ for council tenants, based on private sector principles and levels. This measure produced a national rally of 3,000 tenants in Trafalgar Square in October 1972, and rent strikes in 80 separate local authorities.

The campaigning of tenants between 1968 and 1973 had an effect. Many councils began negotiating with tenants’ organisations for the first time. The Association of London Housing Estates drafted the first tenants’ charter in 1970. Three years later Dick Leonard, a Labour MP, introduced (unsuccessfully) the Council Housing (Tenants’ Representation) Bill.

Between 1974 and 1979 the Labour government continued a policy of cuts in housing. There were often confrontations with councils and the National Co-ordinating Committee Against Housing Cuts organised a national campaign in 1975. In Liverpool the Tenants’ Co-ordinating Committee emerged as a federation for tenants and rent strikes were organised in protest at the council’s policies. The tenants were excluded from all council meetings.

By 1977, the National Tenants’ Organisation had emerged, and organised national conferences and campaigns around the idea of tenants’ charters - Basildon, Scunthorpe and Newcastle are good examples. In 1975, 42 per cent of housing authorities had some form of local negotiating machinery with their tenants. There were still real differences in tenancy agreements and council tenants had few rights beyond those of licensees. Notice to quit was frequently sufficient to evict, and there were few rights of appeal against a landlord’s decision on terms and conditions, who could live in a property, or rent levels.

By the end of the 1970s this sustained campaigning and lobbying resulted in the Housing Bill of 1979, produced by Reg Freeson - the longest serving of Labour’s housing ministers. It tried to placate tenants’ organisations in the ‘winter of discontent’ of trade union militancy.

In 1979 the anti-dampness charter emerged after tenants occupied housing committees in Edinburgh and Sandwell and held rent strikes in Glasgow - the latest in a range of joint tenant and building workers’ campaigns on poor housing conditions on council estates. Mr Freeson included elements of the tenants’ charter approach pioneered by tenants in the 1970s. He also included, at long last, the ‘security of tenure’ council tenants had struggled for since the early humiliations of council tenancies.

Housing laws and tenants’ rights always need to be seen in their social context - security of tenure is no exception.

John Grayson, AdEd Knowledge Company, Sheffield Hallam University

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