Social Housing Action Campaign

Find out more about SHAC on www.shaction.org

A deep and devastating housing crisis has developed in Britain. We are therefore raising funds to create a democratic national tenants' and residents' union able to empower tenants and residents.

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.

Within this context we see estates left with life-threatening disrepairs, rising rents, service charge abuse, race and disability discrimination, rife antisocial behaviour, the loss of low-cost rental housing, a lack of access to legal remedy, revenge evictions and landlord harassment.

These trends have a devastating impact on those affected. Physical and mental sickness is caused by unhealthy homes. Maintaining stable employment is almost impossible when people are forced to relocate regularly. Harmful disruption to work and education results when families have to frequently register with new schools, health and other support services.

There is an urgent need for an national tenants' and residents' union grounded in the principles of democratic self-organisation and self-empowerment. 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, and advocate for legislative and political policy change that favours 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.

Please help us move this project from the planning stage to implementation. Even small donations make a huge difference.

Thank you for your support.

The SHAC Team