You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
How collective power is making a difference for tenants
With a growing private rented sector, new groups are emerging to tackle injustices. Martin Wicks explains how collective organisation can force change
Theresa May’s announcement to end Section 21 evictions was widely welcomed.
If the proposal becomes law after the current consultation, it will be partly thanks to a new generation of renters getting organised and campaigning against the injustice of so-called ‘no-fault evictions’.
The private rental sector now consists of more than four million households. This has led to the emergence of campaigners and groups that are organising against rip-off agencies and landlords that refuse to provide decent and safe living conditions for their tenants.
Most notable of these is ACORN, which has developed as a tenant/community union and has 12 branches nationally with more on the way.
It has had more requests for setting up local groups than it can easily manage.
Originally conceived as a community union based on the model of the US-based Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN initiators began knocking on doors in one area of Bristol.
READ MORE
The most common problem they found was issues with landlords and letting agents.
Tenants are powerless as individuals facing landlords who can remove them easily. What ACORN has achieved, however, is to build collective organisation, a powerful movement of tenants, supporting each other against being exploited by landlords or agencies.
It has mobilised its members to come to the aid of those who are facing eviction or demand that landlords make their properties habitable and safe.
Collective organisation has given individuals, who would otherwise have been frightened to act alone for fear of eviction, the confidence to challenge injustice.
The group has also taken up wider issues. In Bristol, where the first ACORN group was set up, it succeeded in forcing the local council to keep its council tax exemption for the city’s poorest people.
Nationally, it has forced changes after campaigning against banks’ mortgage restrictions on buy-to-let landlords who have housing benefit claimants as tenants.
The government’s changes to regulations on landlord fees were also the direct result of campaigning by ACORN and others.
ACORN initially focused on the private rental sector, where there is a much younger profile than in council or housing association homes.
But the group has begun to campaign in the social housing sector and in support of tenants placed in temporary accommodation by local authorities.
One of the salient features of the current housing crisis is that most of the younger generation – those without access to a bank of mum and dad – stand no chance of a mortgage and little prospect of a council tenancy.
They are forced into the private rental sector. Whereas they might have been able to afford a flat in the past, rent price inflation and changes of government policy have forced more people into shared accommodation.
The Local Housing Allowance (LHA) has been frozen and the lower LHA for shared accommodation rate applies to those under 35 (previously under 24).
“As with collective organisation in the workplace, in communities it can enable tenants to achieve things which would be impossible alone”
In Swindon, for instance, we found that young journalists at the local paper could not afford to rent a flat.
Facing high rents, insecurity of tenure and sometimes very poor living conditions, the idea of a tenant union is resonating which such people.
As with collective organisation in the workplace, in communities it can enable tenants to achieve things which would be impossible alone.
people seems like an impossible dream.
There are now less than 1.6 million council homes in England.
Inevitably there has been a decline in tenant organisation. The huge fall of trade union membership since the 1980s also depleted the number of activists who previously were commonly involved in tenant organisations.
Given the collapse in the numbers of council housing stock, a council tenancy for most young people seems like an impossible dream.
After many years of a dearth of independent tenant organisations, ACORN and others have shown that a younger generation is mobilising against the injustices they face as a result of 10 years of austerity and the worsening housing crisis.
As ACORN says, housing should be a right and not an asset.
A tenants union has the potential to bring together renters across the tenures to act collectively to fight for their interests.
Tenant unions can also challenge the sometimes paternalistic approach of councils to their tenants and campaign for an improvement of the service provided.
They have the potential to play a key role in campaigning for a national housing policy which recognises that so long as housebuilding is dominated by the market then there can be no resolution of the housing crisis.
While it is necessary to fight to improve conditions in the private sector, more and more young people are beginning to appreciate that the housing crisis cannot be seriously addressed without a return to large scale council housebuilding.
Martin Wicks, secretary, Swindon Tenants Campaign Group
