Voice of the people?

It is a rare thing when a dispute over a local authority's rent rises makes national news. But last week a national radio station reported on a rents row with a twist - because the rents weren't put up by as much as the tenants wanted.

Councillors at Barrow council wanted to put them up by a lesser amount to avoid unneccessary hardship, tenants wanted to see home improvements and were happy to pay for them. "We were ignored," came the accusations on prime airtime. An interesting news item, perfect for a talk show and the source of much public debate.

Naturally it wasn't quite so straightforward. The accusations in question came from one person, who alone claimed to be the voice of almost 1,000 fellow tenants in the area. "This person does a great deal of good work, but they in no way represent all the tenants," insisted one officer afterwards.

The fact that a tenant had singlehandedly generated national media interest in a fairly low-key story by purporting to represent all tenants lays bare a fundamental issue facing social landlords at the moment. To say that tenant participation is in vogue would be outrageous understatement. Never before in the last 40 years has the involvement of service users been so fundamental to government housing policy. But as the deadline approaches for councils to have introduced the new tenant compacts, and with the advent of the Housing Corporation's drive towards greater tenant control in housing associations, how difficult can it be to find activists who genuninely represent their fellow tenants?

Of course, tenant reps reject accusations that they are unrepresentative, claiming that such charges are often trumped up in order to remove a thorn in the side of the powers that be. Nevertheless experience throughout the country has shown achieving accurate representation is not easy. The first challenge - and for a long time a source of conflict between authorities and central government - is getting tenants interested in the first place. The London Housing Unit's recent study What Works found that even in areas where tenant participation was thriving genuine representation was hard to achieve. One officer remarked that to have 250 active tenants in a 16,000 tenancy authority, that still made for just 1.5 per cent representation. Even among those involved the level of representation varied considerably.

Elsewhere, the LHU's Sylvia Carter discovered a "notable disparity" between tenants and officers questioned about representation. According to the officers in this authority, 93 per cent of tenants were represented through affiliation of 23 associations to a federation, spanning 9,300 tenancies. This, of course, was based on the assumption that as automatic members of an association, tenants would show up at meetings and get involved, and that those involved could accurately "represent" their peers.

Ministers have made it clear that such unreliable statistics will not be accepted as evidence of tenant participation - and nor will they swallow the old "lack of interest" line as an argument for low turnouts. That said, they did at least concede that representativeness was an issue. "Compacts," said Hilary Armstrong when she launched the new measures, "are not a green light for the continuation of failing existing structures and policies - this is true of tenants" organisations as it is of those of the council itself. Compacts will call for existing roles and organisations to be scrutinised, reviewed, developed or even replaced when they are not working."

Writing later in Housing Today, the then housing minister added: "Tenants who get involved in housing decisions must... genuinely represent the views of their community. To make sure this happens we have included [in the consultation paper on compacts] proposals for a standard for tenant representative organisations, setting the minimum standards councils should expect from tenant groups."

Just because a tenants' association exists, the argument ran, doesn't mean it is necessarily representative. Or as one senior housing manager put it: "In the old days, any tenant who desperately wanted to get on the TA board was immediately suspect. It was those who didn't want to get involved but who we knew would be good at it who we were after."

Westminster council is an example of the way many councils are countering this problem - with the umbrella group. Last week councillors in the borough agreed to establish a new "independent residents' organisation" that is "fully representative of the wider range of interests within the council's housing stock and the wider community." The proposed membership and management will focus on city council tenants and leesees and housing-orientated community groups. It is also likely to be a legal entity, such as a company, charity or friendly society, with a constitution and binding rules which help safeguard against a coup by self-interest groups.

In fact, such safeguards were ditched from the official guidance on implementing tenant compacts. The original consultation paper included standards for tenant involvement structures to which local authorities would have had to adhere. It insisted that tenants be represented by "recognised and active tenant and resident organisations" and that tenants' federations or other umbrella groups be established. The concern was that these were too prescriptive, says Jeanette York of the Local Government Association. "If something looks like its geared towards a large metropolitan authority all it succeeds in doing is alienating all the other authorities we want to encourage." Enormous and bureaucratic institutions can also be forbidding to newcomers, and as we have seen getting newcomers involved is central to the equation.

The old adage that what works in Westminster may not work in Wealden rings true, it seems. As is the trend nowadays, the solution is not likely to come from central government but from local practice, as Helen Coull, tenant participation manager at the Chartered Institute of Housing, explains. Her department is co-ordinating the government's section 16 grants for innovation in participation, and recent feedback is has put involvement and respresentativeness high on the agenda. She is expecting to fund a number of projects aimed at turning this around. "There are ideas about the possibility of using information technology links to connect people up in rural areas and sheltered schemes, others are suggesting using faith groups."

The situation in Barrow highlights the complexity of the situation - the fact that one tenant alone could create national news is indicative of the efforts needed to get a more representative mix involved in decision making. Especially when such a fuss was created over what in the end amounted to a difference in rents of just £10,000 a year - or four pence per tenant a week.