The Tenants' Movement: the domestication and resurgence of a social movement in English housing policy

The launch of a National Tenants Voice for the English social housing sector rekindles a contentious debate among housing scholars over the role played by class and material interest in the mobilisation of collective action. The clear suggestion in the declaration of a National Tenants Voice is that tenants in the fragmented and residualised social housing sector share certain common interests that can be mobilised around, represented and promoted and that there exists a tenants’ movement that is effective to some degree in negotiating at national policy level. The contention that common interests rooted in class or sectoral divisions engender political conflict was the dominant theme in the application of Marxist and Weberian theory to the struggles of social housing tenants in the 1970s and early 1980s. This thesis was debunked in the 1990s when the restructuring of the social housing sector made the assumption of shared interests and common cause between tenants impossible to maintain. The return of the concept of shared interests applied to a tenants’ movement makes it necessary to re-examine the treatment of tenant collective action in academic studies. This paper explores the concept of material interest as applied to housing struggles and provides a new analysis of the mobilisation of tenant collective action. It concludes in setting out an interpretive framework based on social movement theory to guide further study into the mobilisation, aims and effectiveness of the tenants’ movement and its role in English housing policy.