Developments in tenant participation: accounting for growth

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Abstract
Action on tenant participation has been one of the defining features of the Labour government’s housing policy since 1997. As a consequence the government’s major housing policy statement, the Green Paper Quality and choice (DETR/DSS, 2000), treats tenant participation – in the form of Tenant Participation Compacts – largely as “action taken” (p 9). It is considered briefly in chapter 7 on ‘Raising the quality of social housing’, which finishes with six paragraphs on “better management and tenant empowerment” (DETR/DSS, 2000, pp 68-9). There are no new announcements or proposals for legislation, and the concept is given only a few lines. Tenant participation remains, however, an idea with strong appeal to ministers as well as tenants and housing practitioners. This chapter considers efforts by social and political theorists to understand and account for the phenomenon of tenant participation. Social scientists have drawn particularly on theories of power, the (welfare) state, and democracy and citizenship in attempts to explain a phenomenon that they tend to agree has grown since the 1960s or 1970s. These accounts and theories are reviewed briefly then used to interrogate the development of tenant participation, including the Labour government’s programme, and the questions of what it is, whether it has grown and what the nature of that growth might mean for the status and role of tenants. But first we consider what the Labour government’s tenant participation programme has been. The Labour government’s commitment to tenant participation has been translated into a number of initiatives (DETR, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 1999d, 1999e; Cole et al, 2000), the foremost of which are the development of Tenant Participation Compacts and Best Value.

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