Tenants have campaigned for over 100 years to have a say in decisions about their homes. Tenants have protested, lobbied, gone on rent strike, demonstrated in the streets, chained themselves to railings and fought with the police, all to have a seat on their landlord’s decision-making bodies. As social housing tenants we believe in participatory democracy – we believe that people should work to together to make decisions over issues that affect them. That is why in the 1970s and 1980s tenants welcomed the opportunity to develop a new partnership with landlords and with government. This partnership is called tenant participation or resident involvement.

Resident involvement began in the 1970s in just a few councils as a response to tenant campaigns for involvement in decision-making during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During 1980s resident involvement spread like wildfire up and down the country as landlords and tenants realised the benefits. It has given tenants real opportunities to increase our voice in social housing policy. Tenants organisations have been set up and strong tenants federations have evolved. Tenants have developed their own ideas about how social housing should be run. But those increases in voice have been at a very local level. Tenants have struck up partnerships with local managers, or used their position as directors or panel members to work to improve things at a neighbourhood level. But we have failed so far to make our voices heard successfully at the very top. We may have tenant board members on most of the new housing organisations but they have not yet been able to change the culture or the strategic direction of landlords. We see financial values coming to dominate social housing organisations and decisions made not on what’s best for tenants but on what’s best for the bottom line.

At a national level – at government level – tenants have almost no influence at all. Despite building a national organisation that can lobby government, we have been powerless to stop the damage caused by Right to Buy or privatisation schemes and the increasing tendency by government to look down on social housing tenants as ‘the undeserving poor’.

How can we as tenants increase our voice at the top of housing decision-making?

Last year, the government advisor Martin Cave was asked to change the way housing companies are regulated. Councils and ALMOs have been regulated by the government directly while housing associations have been governed through the Housing Corporation. Both ALMOs and Housing Associations are inspected by the Audit Commission and tenants see these inspections as a pretty good thing. If it hadn’t been for the Audit Commission inspections, many landlords would not have given tenants a say.

Housing associations would like to see less regulation and less red tape and Martin Cave agreed. But in return for more freedom, he said that tenants needed to be given more power. Cave argued that tenants should be able to inspect their landlord and call in the regulator if things were going wrong.

The Government has taken up many of Cave’s ideas and in the Housing and Regeneration Bill they have set up a new regulator for housing associations. This new regulator is called the Tenant Services Authority (it was called Oftenant – or the Office of Tenants and Social Landlords). It will have the power to inspect, fine, take over or even close down bad performing landlords. We expect ALMOs and Council housing organisations to come under the power of the new regulator inside two years, and it takes over the regulation of housing associations this April.

The Housing & Regeneration Bill should give tenants some more influence, if the lobbying of TPAS and the National Consumer Council is successful. Tenants will be able to go direct to the regulator if they are concerned about their landlord’s service. And for the first time government will have to consult a national tenants body when it sets the standards for social housing.

The creation of the Tenant Services Authority and the new regulation regime means that tenants organisations have the opportunity to take on an inspection role. We can act as a watchdog on behalf of tenants, monitoring our landlord’s service and reporting bad performance.

TPAS, along with the Chartered Institute of Housing, has called for tenant-led regulation. They argue that housing organisations should give powers to tenants panels that will independently inspect them and advise on improvements.

Leeds Tenants Federation, like many tenants federations, already monitors landlords. We do mystery shopping and use satisfaction surveys to measure the performance of a wide range of social landlords in this region. Kirklees Federation, Yorkshire & the Humber Federation and many others do similar.

Tenants federations offer an independent tenants scrutiny of the housing service. And when there is an independent body able to give impartial advice you have to ask why any social landlord would not take us up on it. There is no reason why any social landlord should set up its own mystery shoppers, or use its own tenant inspectors when there is an independent tenant-led alternative. Any landlord setting up their own in house monitoring system really has to show that it has independence and that tenants are completely free to come to their own conclusions. Because if they don’t want independent tenants organisations to monitor them – what have they got to hide?

It is the independence of tenants organisations that matters. Independent tenants think for themselves. Independent tenants organisations come up with their own ideas. Getting our voice heard by landlords – having a National Tenants Voice with government – means nothing unless our voice has real power. We don’t want to make suggestions or to shout advice from the touchline. What tenants want is to be fully involved as equal partners in the running of the housing service.

At the grass roots we want to be fully involved in the decisions about services and budgets. We have shown that we can develop working partnerships that improve the lives of housing staff and the lives of tenants.

At board level we need to take over the direction of our housing companies before it is too late. We need to be setting the agenda and putting the tenants, not the money-men first.

And at national level we need to be more than just a voice crying in the wilderness. We need to be policy makers, leaders, people with vision. If we have a government that believes that social renting is a badge of failure and that social housing is just a safety net and not a real choice for citizens, it is high time we started to raise our voices and flex our muscles.

Tenants need to win the ability to change the direction and the culture of social housing. We need to change it so that everyone has the chance to rent a decent home in a decent neighbourhood if they choose to. We need to change it because we know best what social housing should be. We know best how social housing should be run. Tenants need to take the lead and we need to make a start now.