Gateway to revolution

A: consider setting up an arm's-length management organisation instead; B: shrug your shoulders and ask for more money or C: plunge into a completely untested and radically new form of housing management that puts the tenants in charge?

Not every council would choose option C, but that's what Preston council in Lancashire has done. It is setting up a "community gateway" project, the first in the UK.

The council's director of housing, Peter Deacon, will become the project's manager in the next few weeks. He explains: "Like many local authorities, unless we get external funding, we have no chance of hitting the decent homes target because of the condition of our housing stock." This meant that retaining the city's 7000 homes in council ownership wasn't an option. So when stock transfer proved unpopular with tenants who felt it didn't give them enough involvement in how their housing was run, the way was open for something new.

The problem of communities not feeling empowered by the stock transfer option is not a new one. In her report last month into Birmingham's failed stock transfer ballot, professor Anne Power concluded that the proposals had been unconvincing and tenants had not been engaged. Power advocated a system in which proposals would emerge from neighbourhood level, rather than being imposed from the top.

That's the principle at the heart of the community gateway concept. The system is not dissimilar to the "community mutual" model now being espoused by the Welsh Assembly as an alternative to full stock transfer, and its present form was designed by the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Confederation of Cooperative Housing and the Cooperative Union. At its heart is the principle that tenants and communities should be instrumental in determining the future of their homes and neighbourhood.

All over the country, it has been apparent that tenants have been involved too little and too late in decisions over their housing (see "The Challenges", page 26). Although there may be a handful of tenant board members, the apparent lack of other ways for communities to engage with the process of deciding the destiny of their homes has not been enough to give tenants confidence in the stock transfer option.

Community gateways attack that problem on two fronts. First, at the backbone of the system there is a "community gateway association" – a not-for-profit organisation that can be used to manage council stock, as an ALMO, or take over ownership as a housing association. The funding regime will be the same as it is with traditional transfers to a registered social landlord. The community gateway association could be used for all or part of the stock; it could be an industrial and provident society or a company limited by guarantee, and it could be a freestanding organisation or part of a group structure. Whatever its nature, the key thing is that the association would be owned by the tenants, even though its membership could include leaseholders and other corporate bodies.

The potential for moving towards tenant empowerment is now widely recognised in government 

Caroline Keightley, ODPM community housing taskforce

The tenants, as owners of their housing management system, would then be able to decide how much involvement they would like in the running of their homes. One community might be very keen to get involved and could become the managers or even the owners of the housing stock, whereas another community might wish only to be consulted. The likely outcome, over a period of years, is an ever-changing patchwork of different levels of community engagement.

More than token participation
The real power of the system, though, is in its second element – the community gateway process itself. This involves developing a strategy to offer real empowerment to tenants: a systematic approach rather than the ad hoc methods of consultation and participation that are too often found in standard stock transfer or ALMO programmes. If community engagement is to be more than mere tokenism, tenants must not only have seats on the board but also be genuinely involved in a process in which they are building their capacity to make decisions about their community at the same time as their power is evolving.

Questions like "how do we get the housing investment we need?" are not the first ones to be asked, but come some way into the process. The starting point is "what does the local community want?" – giving tenants the space to express their priorities, then working out solutions that address these priorities. This is not a one-off, but the start of a process in which communities are encouraged to take charge of decision-making, at the pace and to the extent that they feel able to do so.

The government is already considering the model. Caroline Keightley, a member of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's community housing taskforce, says: "The messages coming out of the current government review of how to achieve the decent homes target include the importance and value of community involvement in delivering change.

The potential for moving from tenant participation towards tenant empowerment is now widely recognised.

"The report does not have all the answers. But we hope that – in two or three places initially – it might lead to genuine experiments based on partnership working in which 'take it or leave it' solutions are no longer relevant."

In Preston, community gateway manager Peter Deacon says preliminary work will begin soon on detailed research into community aspirations and he wants to run a training programme for residents. He is bidding for extra financial support from government to develop this and is aiming for a tenant ballot to transfer to the community gateway model in 2004. "One of our aims is to grow our own people from within the community," he says. "We envisage that local people may enter the training programme as volunteers but that once the community gateway model is established they will move forward, perhaps to take up paid roles in the development and encouragement of tenant empowerment locally."