New nomads: the dispossession of the consumer in social housing

With the advent of flexible tenancies, marketised rents, the abolition of a consumer-focused regulator and the disbanding of the National Tenant Voice, three decades of efforts to induce consumer pressure in the English social housing sector have been abandoned by the Coalition Government. It appears social housing tenants in England are no longer to be considered as consumers and have been returned instead to their stigmatised identity as welfare dependents. While these twin identities have long characterised the position of tenants in the social housing sector, the promise of liberty and equality inherent in the role of the consumer has been the basis through which the quality of the offer of social housing has been maintained and through which claims on social citizenship have been launched. This paper analyses the mechanisms by which a consumer identity has been mobilised to ensure the resilience of the social housing sector in the face of continuous governmental erosion. Drawing on a detailed positioning analysis of discussions in tenants’ organisations, it investigates the use of a consumer identity in collective mobilisations to defend the quality of the sector and, inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri, it provides a theoretical framework through which to consider the potential for future claims on social citizenship on the margins of housing policy.

http://www.york.ac.uk/chp/hsa/spring11/papers.htm