A National Housing Union – More Info – Social Housing Action Campaign

A National Housing Union for All Tenants and Residents

SHAC is working with campaign partners to establish an independent, democratic, national union run by and for tenants and residents. It is designed to empower tenants and residents affected by the housing emergency to fundamentally address inequalities in the housing landscape.

The problem: The landlord-tenant power imbalance reveals itself through:

Housing costs: rising rents and mortgages.
Poor quality housing: poorly built homes with widespread disrepair, and housing insecurity.
Flawed regulations: Landlord lobbying has weakened tenant protections over decades.
Vanishing support: Public and charitable advice services that help support tenants to stay in their homes (for example tackling drug and alcohol addiction and anti-social behaviour) have faced severe funding cuts.
Superficial responses: Government and landlord initiatives offer complaints procedures and engagement mechanisms but deny actual power.
Isolated communities: Fragmented neighbourhoods lack the structural support to collectivise issues.
Insufficient scale: Existing campaign groups lack the size to match the power of housing providers and their regulatory institutions.

Our solution is a mass, national, democratic Housing Union for all tenants and residents to build sustainable community power by executing five main objectives:

Casework: Handling individual tenant issues and collectivising shared complaints.
Litigation: Launching landmark legal challenges to systematically influence landlord behaviour.
Lobbying: Campaigning for legal and regulatory shifts that protect residents.
Organising: Deploying a peer-support framework to build long-term local influence.
Cohesion: Reducing resident isolation by connecting people within and between neighbourhoods.

The Blueprint

Our blueprint lays out the case for the formation of a National Housing Union, explains who it is for, how it will run, and how it will be funded. It concludes with a proposal for the next steps we need to take in order to turn the vision into reality.

Click an image to view the document. The Condensed Version (left) is 44 pages long including appendices. The Full Version (right) is 80 pages long including appendices. The leaflet is double-sided.

Please feel free to comment on the Blueprint using the text box below:

Origins

Project planning is being led by a steering group which meets once per quarter, and more detailed work is being undertaken by a dedicated taskforce.

Suzanne Muna, SHAC Secretary and Co-Founder, speaks to Ben Jenkins on his Housing Sector podcast about the need for a housing union, and how SHAC is working with others to bring it about.

Why is it needed?

Members of SHAC and other housing campaign groups are all too keenly aware that a deep and devastating housing crisis has developed in Britain.

Tenants and residents are outflanked when trying to challenge large, powerful corporate landlords who have seemingly endless resources and superior access to decision makers in local and national government, and in the press.

This has created an environment in which the landlord narrative is dominant, and alternative perspectives are efficiently, sometimes brutally, silenced.

Whereas there are many community and campaign groups carrying out excellent work to help tenants and residents self-organise, there is currently no national tenant and resident union of sufficient scale to redress this power imbalance.

It is within this context that we see:

Estates left with life-threatening disrepairs;
Rising rents, service charge abuse;
Race and disability discrimination, and a failure to provide accessible housing:
Antisocial behaviour;
A loss of low cost rental housing;
The stigmatisation of renters and the concept of social housing;
Lack of access to legal remedy for housing issues;
Revenge evictions; and
Landlord harassment.

These trends have a direct impact in our workplaces. Pay rises won by trade union activists are immediately siphoned off to landlords. Workers lose too many days to sickness caused by unhealthy homes, the psychological strain of persistent antisocial behaviour, and the cumulative stress of defending themselves against a landlord’s war of attrition. Maintaining stable employment is almost impossible when workers are forced to relocate regularly or even end up homeless due to unjustified evictions and the lack of genuinely affordable housing.

The establishment of a tenants’ voice has been attempted several times, but all have failed, primarily because they were top-down approaches, funded and controlled by government or charities. They did not seek to create tenant and resident self-organisation, or crumbled because demand outstripped supply.

This does not however mean that a tenants and residents union will inevitably end in failure, but that the initiative needs to emerge from the labour movement and be grounded in the principles of self-organisation and developing a layer of activists able to empower member self-advocacy.

Like a trade union, such a body would:

Support tenants and residents with individual casework;
Support and resource members to campaign collectively on their estates;
Advocate for legislative and political policy changes that favour tenants and residents, not landlords.
Provide an alternative narrative to the media based on the perspective of tenants and residents, not landlords.

Such a union would seek to end government endeavours to divide different categories of tenants and residents, applying protections to some and not others based on tenancy or landlord type, and conceding only to those with the loudest voices. We believe that this has been a factor in allowing the housing crisis to flourish.

A union on a mass scale will be able to unite renters, shared owners, and leaseholders. It will also be open to all, irrespective of their landlord, whether council, housing association, or private, and seek to address problems with managing agents.

SHAC is therefore working with campaign partners and the trade unions to explore the establishment of a housing union set up by the trade union movement and working to a collective self-empowerment model.

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