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Liberals have long believed that wide property ownership, serving as a bulwark against state tyranny, is essential to the preservation of liberty.  However, our pluralism has ensured that we have historically been committed to a diversity of housing models, including social housing. With the need for our party to engage with, and empower, communities who often feel forgotten, and deprived of real power over their lives, Liberal Democrats must offer a clear, distinctive, and liberal approach to social housing. What should this look like?

In recent years, various local authorities have brought their housing stock under their direct control,  replacing arms-length management organisations, and other local authorities, including my own, Gateshead Council, are planning to do likewise.

However, both of these models – the ‘partial privatisation’ offered by arms-length management organisations and the (local) statism of in-house control –  suffer from the same weakness: they deny tenants meaningful control over the management of their homes. Just as ‘Tenant panels’ and ‘Focus groups’ are not a substitute for participatory democracy, the opportunity to lobby local Councillors, in the hope that they will come to aid of a tenant, ignores the need to decentralise and devolve power to the level at which it should be exercised: with the tenant. Both of the above models exemplify the stale and dull bureaucratic managerialism of much of local government and are premised on a paternalistic ethic that has little, if any, concern with empowering local residents to take ownership of their communities.

In contrast to these hierarchal and ‘top-down’ approaches, liberals should lead the call for an expansion in mutual housing. Unfortunately, while popular in other countries, such as Sweden, mutual housing is relatively scarce within the UK and, insofar as it does exist, has tended to be small in scale. There are, however, notable exceptions to this. For instance, in Rochdale – home of the Pioneers – the UK’s first tenant and employee co-owned mutual housing society operates and manages 13,000 properties.

Of course, as far back as J.S. Mill, liberals have advocated cooperatives, although often within in the context of the workplace and industry. However, as with workers’ cooperatives, mutuals and cooperative housing models combine political and economic democracy;  at their best they are sites of democratic control and joint ownership. They promote community spirit, individual responsibility, a stakeholder ethos, and have produced above average resident satisfaction ratings and sound housing management performance.

While, as liberals, we must strive for a fairer distribution of wealth, we must also work to ensure that power is spread more widely within our society; concentrations of power are an enemy of liberty. Indeed, whereas the socialist has frequently emphasised the distribution of wealth to the neglect of power, it has been the liberal who has tended to stress the distribution of power; after all, a society in which one’s material needs are met, and yet one is reduced to the role of little more than a supplicant, is not a liberal one. In seeking to reform the management of social housing, liberals would do well to look to the mutual sector.

* Daniel Duggan is a Liberal Democrat Councillor in Gateshead