Approaches to tenant participation in the English local authority sector

This paper examines how approaches to tenant participation evolved in the English local authority housing sector in the 1990s. It does so by examining data gleaned from two national studies of tenant participation activity conducted by teams based at Glasgow and Sheffield Hallam universities, with particular attention focusing on data derived from nine case studies undertaken as part of the latter study. In order to facilitate this analysis, reference is made to Cairncross et al.'s typology of approaches to tenant participation which identified three ideal types of authority: traditional, consumerist and citizenship. The paper notes that the approaches local authorities took to tenant participation changed in the 1990s with more adopting multi-dimensional approaches, which made the neat categorisation of authorities into ideal types impossible. The characteristics of the two most commonly occurring types, traditional and consumerist, appeared to have changed.