Citizenship and consumption with reference to the Liverpool newbuild housing cooperative movement

Citizenship and consumption in the development of social rights: the Liverpool new-build housing co-operative movement.

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Contents PageAbstract 4

Chapter 1: Introduction 5

Chapter 2: Citizenship since Marshall: towards the empowered social citizen?

18

Marshall: Citizenship in social rights and social institutions

18

Active and Passive Citizenship 20Marshall and Giddens: Marshall as a social theorist 25Conclusion to chapter 2: rights-based social citizenship today

35

Chapter 3: Empowerment, participation and consumption 36

Power, empowerment and disempowerment 36Why ladders don’t work 42Three models of empowerment 44Citizenship, collective consumption and public goods 53Empowerment through participation 61Empowerment and consumption 69Conclusion to chapter 3 78Chapter 4: Introduction to the co-operative housing case study

80

Developing a hypothesis 80Choice of methodology for testing the hypothesis 82The empirical study: a historical case study of co-operative housing

87

Data sources and commentary on “practitioner observation”

87

Co-operative housing: scope and British background 92Literature on co-operative housing: communitarianism and user control

98


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Co-operative housing in Britain: development into the 1970s

100

Conclusion to chapter 4 114Chapter 5: Case study: new-build co-operative housing in Liverpool

116

Liverpool - political and social background 116Liverpool - background to housing policy to 1974 119Co-operative housing in Liverpool 124Weller Way - co-operatives and new building 135Politics and aftermath 160Conclusion to chapter 5: Choice, participation and empowerment

179

Chapter 6: Conclusions: researching the empowered social citizen

185

References 189

Figures: Models of empowerment

Following page

Figure 1: Cairncross et al (tenant

participation) 46

Figure 2: Prior et al (local government)

49

Figure 3: Woods (consumer-citizens as

school governors) 51


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Figure 4: Summary of the three models

60

Abbreviations used in this thesis

CDS Co-ownership Development SocietyCDS Co-operative Development Services

(Liverpool)CDSCHS CDS Co-operative Housing SocietyCPL Co-operative Planning LimitedDoE Department of the EnvironmentHA Housing AssociationHAG Housing Association GrantHC Housing CorporationLA Local AuthorityLHT Liverpool Housing TrustMIH Merseyside Improved HousesNHS Neighbourhood Housing ServicesSNAP Shelter Neighbourhood Action ProjectTMC Tenant Management Co-operativeTMO Tenant Management OrganisationURS Urban Regeneration Strategy


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Abstract

This thesis examines the empowerment of

the citizen as bearer of social rights. Its

research problem is whether developing

"citizenship" is compatible with empowering users

of social goods and services as "consumers."

Chapter 1 is an introduction considering the

current relevance of the “social rights” model of

T. H. Marshall in the light of the experience of

the British welfare state and the citizenship

revival with the emphasis proposed by Mouffe on

pluralism and civil society. Chapter 2 examines

the rights-based and participative models of

citizenship, and reviews Marshall as a social

theorist against Giddens’ criticism of him as an

evolutionist whose model applies only to Britain.

It is argued that Marshall is not an evolutionist

and that his model can be developed in an

international context as based on reflexive

understanding of history. Chapter 3 considers the

meaning of empowerment and reviews its

relationship to participation and consumption. It

argues that current conditions are adding

empowerment to the social rights of the citizen

and analyses consumer, customer and participatory

empowerment. It suggests that these may complement

each other as the operations of both individuals


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and groups. Chapter 4 introduces a case study of

co-operative housing. A hypothesis and methodology

are explained and the role of the practitioner as

observer is discussed. The scope of “co-operative

housing” as a means of user control is established

and its British history outlined. Chapter 5 is a

case study of co-operative control of new housing

development by users in Liverpool leading to the

development of an innovative service market and to

a hostile political reaction in 1983.

Chapter 6 is a short conclusion including

a consideration of methods for meeting the

anticipated demand for richer models of the

“empowered social citizen.”

Acknowledgements

I should like to place on record my thanks

for my supervisors during the production of this

thesis: Peter Kemp, Valerie Karn and, especially,

Professor Patricia Garside who has patiently

persisted, prompted and guided. Thanks are due to


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many other scholars for suggestions and insights

along the way.

Deep thanks are due to Kay, Jacob and

Naomi for making time and space and extending

tolerance during many moments of struggle and

distraction.

I should also like to thank my work

colleagues, Ed, Jane and Joy, for their patience

and support.

Paul Lusk

August 1998


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Chapter 1

Introduction

Nineteen years ago, when Julia Parker

concluded her book on “Social Policy and

Citizenship” with the words: “The development of

social policy based on a conception of citizenship

is a formidable challenge both to sociological

imagination and to political resolve” (Parker

1979:173), many would have found her ideas

seriously outmoded. Interest in citizenship -

either in academic social theory or in working out

directions for a welfare state widely thought to

be in terminal crisis - had virtually disappeared.

Now her words seem prophetic. In the 1990s there

has been “an explosion of interest in the concepts

of citizenship among political theorists”

(Kymlicka and Norman 1994:352). This rise of

interest is due at least partly to “efforts by

social theorists to understand and evaluate the


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profound changes in the nature of modern

societies” and citizenship “has become a central

issue for social policy” (Prior, Stewart and Walsh

1995:166).

The link between citizenship, social

theory and social or “welfare” policy was

established in a seminal essay by Professor T. H.

Marshall in 1950: “Citizenship and Social Class”

has been reprinted many times since (Marshall,

1992). Central to his thinking was the idea of

“social rights” or a “right to welfare” (Marshall,

1981). The "welfare state" gave citizens rights to

certain services, regarded as essential to

belonging to a modern civilised society; including

health, education and housing. Marshall argued it

was a prominent twentieth century achievement to

add these "social" rights to two other types of

citizen rights, which he called "civil" rights

(such as the right to free speech or the right to

enter into a contract without interference) and


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"political" rights (such as the right to vote.) He

saw the creation of social rights as completing a

process which began with the break-up of the old

feudal system. Social rights laid the foundation

for a basic equality among all members of modern

society - even though the capitalist market

continued to divide people by class. Both the

inequality of the market place, and the equality

of the citizen, were necessary for a modern

society to function, and the two could operate

alongside each other - a principle of equality,

and a principle of inequality, in a kind of

balance with each other. When "Citizenship and

Social Class" was published in 1950, Britain had,

in his words (1992:7), "frankly a socialist

system" - not just a welfare state but a state

where the government made all the main decisions

about producing goods and services, and took many

major industries into state ownership.


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Some of these socialist innovations were

reversed by the Conservative governments of 1951-

64. But they still remained committed to a welfare

state - even to expanding some parts of it, such

as council housing. The idea of social rights was

not seriously challenged by practical politicians

or mainstream social thinkers. The Labour

government of 1964-70 made the expansion of

welfare services a centrepiece of its programme.

It was then that doubts started to develop. These

were partly about affordability - could the

welfare state continue to expand without

threatening the business system's ability to go on

producing wealth? But there were also doubts about

whether the welfare state was producing the

benefits it had promised. These doubts were

greatest in connection with housing. In many

cities, local authority housing programmes were

destroying homes that people did not necessarily

want to lose, and forcing them into large estates

with design faults and social problems. A


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television film called "Cathy Come Home" showed

council housing officials as inhuman bureaucrats,

and inspired the formation of the housing charity

"Shelter." When council flats in a high rise block

in east London collapsed after a gas explosion,

Ronan Point (the name of the block) became a

metaphor for the failure of housing policy.

Research on local housing suggested that much

blame lay with failure on the part of local

authorities to find out what local residents

wanted or what their real experience was.

Furthermore, even when they did find these things

out, government organisations took the position

that people’s own views were not worth acting on:

the consumer’s perceived interestswere regarded as a miscalculation,pernicious to himself and as adatum worthless to the official.The consumer does not know enoughabout either his own conditions orthose he (sic) will be offered.Partly, this is a straightforwardmatter of the consumer’s ignorance.Partly this is a matter of theconsumer’s active preference forwhat is objectively inferior.

(Dennis, 1970:345).


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This writer contrasted the position of

users of “welfare” services with that of consumers

of goods and services produced by competitive

private firms. If firms ignored users’ wishes,

they would (and did) find that they could not sell

their products. Professor Robert Pinker (1971:144-

5) argued that the welfare state was

“stigmatising” the people who used it - which, by

definition, meant that it was failing to treat

them as “citizens.” There were two possible

solutions - either to give people the same rights

as private firms gave their customers, that is to

be able to choose between competing providers; or

to enable users to participate, as citizens, in

the running of the services. However he found a

long tradition of resistance to user empowerment,

going back to the socialist thinkers, like the

Webbs, whose ideas shaped the formation of welfare

services. There were also deeper resistances that

Pinker thought stood in the way of fully realised


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citizen rights. A capitalist society ultimately

valued its members as people who could compete in

the labour market as successful producers. He

feared that people who could not make this kind of

contribution would always be stigmatised and this

would be reflected in the quality of service in

welfare institutions (204-207). Research in France

found that the quality of service received by

users of welfare services varied according to the

class and status of users, and the French

sociologist Preteceille (1986) argued that this

reflected society’s valuation of people according

to their contribution as producers to the market

economy.

In the 1970s, Marshall's ideas seemed to

be overtaken by events. The trend of growing

welfare spending halted in 1976. In some quarters

influenced by marxism, there were expectations

that a collapsing welfare state would trigger a

socialist resurgence led by “urban social


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movements” (Castells, 1977). Some favoured a

“pluralistic” welfare system with a variety of

voluntary and self-help options to state

provision: this approach was influenced by the

perceived “failure of the state” (Hadley and

Hatch, 1981) and a need for alternatives to state

socialism. Tenant controlled housing offered one

such alternative (Luard 1979:153). But as

“Thatcherism” took hold in the 1980s, a different

vision seemed more credible: one where citizen

rights to welfare would be replaced by consumer

benefits gained through an expanding market system

(Saunders, 1986).

However, if Lady Thatcher hoped to abolish

the welfare state, it was a project that ran into

the ground even before she lost power in 1990. A

third of council houses were sold to sitting

tenants, but most of the rest remained as state-

owned housing, providing a home for one UK

household out of every five. The health service


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was subject to an "internal market" but went on

growing under a government protesting its

commitment to free health care for all. Some

schools came out of council control but most

children continued to be educated by the state.

After 1990, the Conservative government under John

Major picked up the idea of a "citizen's charter"

as a way to try to guarantee standards of services

from councils and government departments. So

perhaps Marshall had been right all along -

although our society was a more capitalistic, it

still needed to guarantee "social rights" to

citizens. Thinkers who guided the Labour Party

thought "citizenship" could be the new "big idea"

replacing Thatcherism's faith in the free market.

They did not mean this just as a way to dress-up

and relaunch traditional moderate socialism. They

thought it would develop into a new political

philosophy, merging elements of socialist and

liberal ideas (Andrews, 1991). Chantal Mouffe, as

a “post marxist”, roots the need for a revived


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concept of citizenship in a call to face the

reasons for the failure of the traditional

socialist project - a project that recognised that

the "ideals of a modern democracy" are not being

implemented in practice and proceeded to

denounce them as a sham and aim atthe construction of a completelydifferent society. This radicalalternative is precisely what hasbeen shown to be disastrous by thetragic experience of Soviet-stylesocialism.

The “only hope for the renewal of the

left-wing project” is to “force liberal and

democratic society to be accountable for their

professed ideals” (Mouffe, 1992a:1-2). There

will always be competinginterpretations of the sharedprinciples of equality and libertyand therefore different views ofcitizenship ... This is why radicaldemocracy also means the radicalimpossibility of a fully achieveddemocracy (14).

This embrace of liberal pluralism by the

post-marxist left is “one of the major theoretical

phenomena of our times” (Kymlicka and Norman,


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1994:359n). Accompanying it is a recovery of

interest in “civil society” - the “space of

uncoerced human association and also the set of

relational networks - formed for the sake of

family, faith, interest and ideology - that fill

this space” (Walzer 1992:89). This a society of

small scale, often local, projects: projects that

are rarely heroic or all-absorbing, but a

patchwork which together sustain a sense of

connection and mutual responsibility without which

the grander political designs of freedom and

equality turn into oppression. This democratic

civil society is essential to sustain a democratic

state, but an active state is also necessary: the

“roughly equal and widely dispersed capabilities

that sustain the networks have to be fostered by

the democratic state.” Civil society challenges

state power, but “civil society, left to itself,

generates radically unequal power relationships,

which only state power can challenge” (104).


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The political context for the “citizenship

revival” thus includes a significant withdrawal of

favour from the left for the kind of “socialist

system” sponsored by Labour in Britain after the

second world war. This withdrawal is related to

the Thatcherite domination of the 1980s and to the

chronic authoritarianism and subsequent collapse

of the Soviet system, but the lessons it applies

go beyond simply endorsing these phenomena as

historical facts which constrain socialist

possibilities. There are more fundamental lessons

that history has taught, about the meaning of

individual autonomy and the need to invest in

civil society. In sponsoring citizenship, the main

creative tasks now fall on self-motivated action

especially at the neighbourhood level. The state

must regulate, inform, constrain and enable. In

one way this vision of the relationship between

the state and civil society seems so familiar as

to be a cliché. But as this thesis develops it

should become clear that there is much practical


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work, and research, to be done on what the “civil

society argument” means in constituting the

“social citizen” and welfare provision.

The welfare institutions which Marshall

believed underpinned social rights - such as the

health service, local authority schools and public

housing - have survived beyond and despite the

expectations of critics. But they remain under

continuing pressure to change, especially to

become more responsive to the needs and wants of

those who use these services. How should those

users be involved in making services more

responsive - as “citizens” who participate in

democratic politics, or as “consumers” who make

choices about the services they prefer? Much

recent commentary has suggested that these are two

alternative ways of “empowering” users: that we

can consider users either as participating citizens,

or as customer-consumers (Hill, 1994; Lowndes,

1995; Cairncross et al, 1994; Prior, Stewart and


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Walsh, 1995; Furbey et al, 1996). Does this

opposition make sense - and where does it leave

the idea of a citizen as someone who has “rights”?

This is the problem considered in this thesis.

Chapter one has given a short overview of

Marshall and his legacy, and how the debates over

citizenship and social rights have moved on since

1950.

Chapter two considers Marshall as a

theorist and his current significance in the light

of the citizenship revival and its link with

“empowerment” of users. Marshall’s rights-based

theory is criticised generally for rendering the

citizen “passive.” Marshall did not see

“empowerment” of users to be relevant to social

rights as he understood them, and he had great

confidence in the state as provider of “social”

goods and services. The chapter asks if the


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“empowered social citizen” is a bearer of “social

rights” or whether an alternative version of

citizenship, based on political participation, is

more relevant. Anthony Giddens, the leading

sociologist of our day, has criticised Marshall as

an evolutionist, who gives too little attention to

the way that established rights may be disputed;

and as an internalist whose theory is not meant to

work outside Britain (Giddens, 1985:203-209;

1982). These are substantial criticisms which, if

true, would leave Marshall weakened as a social

theorist. I shall suggest that these criticisms

are doubtful in a number of respects, and cannot

be regarded as conclusive. Marshall’s social

theory, I will suggest, is more sophisticated than

Giddens allows.

Chapter 3 continues the theme of

“empowerment.” It first considers what

“empowerment” might mean, looking particularly at

the work of Giddens and Stuart Clegg. It then


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considers three recent models that examine the

linkage between empowerment, citizenship,

consumption and participation. This gives rise to

discussion on “public goods” and “collective

consumption.” The chapter moves to look in more

detail at the meaning of “participation” and

“consumption” (or consumerism) and in what way

these define roles and opportunities that can

“empower” the user of social goods and services.

Chapter 4 introduces the empirical

research in this thesis, which is developed in

Chapter 5 as a historical case study on the

development of new housing by user co-operatives

in Liverpool. Chapter 4 begins by developing the

hypothesis that the empowerment of the social

citizen is not facilitated by making a political

selection between possible roles or orientations -

notably between the often stated alternatives of

participant or consumer - but rather, that such

empowerment requires a combination of these roles.


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The chapter considers the methodological issues

raised by this hypothesis. The hypothesis could be

examined by experiment, survey, observation or

historical case study. The strengths and problems

of each of these are considered and the reasons

for selecting a historical case study method are

explained. The chapter moves on to review the

benefits of an empirical focus on housing, and

then on co-operative housing as a study field. It

introduces the Liverpool new build co-operatives

in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the empirical

study, and states the opportunities and

limitations of this study. The data sources are

described and my own role as a participant

observer and practitioner in relation to the

material is described and the implications of

practitioner interest in academic research are

discussed. Chapter 4 continues with a brief review

of the history of “co-operation” and the

theoretical significance of co-operative housing

as an instance of user control. The chapter


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concludes with a short account of the background

to the development of co-operative housing in

Britain since the second world war, explaining the

context for interest in the co-operative model for

user-controlled welfare services in the 1970s.

Chapter 5 is the case study of the “new-

build housing co-operatives” that developed in

Liverpool in the 1970s, culminating in substantial

conflict with the local authority after the

election of a Labour majority council in 1983. The

chapter opens with a short portrait of Liverpool,

its politics and housing policy. It then gives a

narrative of the origins and development of “new-

build housing co-operatives” where people in

distressed housing were able to select sites and

architects, recruit people in housing need as

members, design their own projects, promote the

designation of their neighbourhoods for slum

clearance, participate in design and collectively

own the completed rented housing developments. The


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attitude of political actors is explained, and the

consequences of the co-operatives for national

thinking on user involvement is considered. A

conclusion to the chapter reviews the implications

of the study on the citizen/consumer debate. It

considers how and why user empowerment through

participation was facilitated by choices in a

service market and by restrictions imposed by

political actors.

The conclusion to the thesis in chapter 6

considers the research against recent

international work on social rights. It considers

the scope for further research into the

empowerment of the social citizen.


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Chapter 2

Citizenship since Marshall: towards the

empowered social citizen?

As we saw in the previous chapter, the

1990s has witnessed an upsurge on interest in the

citizenship. In the main, this has been led by a

view of the citizen as a bearer of rights

(Kymlicka and Norman 1994:354). The influence of

T. H. Marshall in forming the figure of the

rights-bearing modern citizen is widely

acknowledged - as the "brilliant .. source for all

discussions" (Fraser and Gordon 1994:92), the

"starting point" for "much of the substantial

subsequent literature" (Heater 1990:265), or the

"starting point for contemporary debate" (Prior,

Stewart and Walsh 1995:7). Marshall "almost single

handedly revived the notion of citizenship, and

disseminated a particular view of it so


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successfully that it can to be seen ... as the

only possible account" (Rees 1996:8).

Marshall: Citizenship in social rights and social

institutions

Marshall (1992) argued that there were

three categories of rights which together compose

the figure of the modern citizen: civil rights,

meaning the personal liberties and abilities to

enter into and enforce contracts, upheld by the

courts; political rights, focused on the right to

elect, and be elected to, legislature and

government; and social rights, the entitlement to

the basic means of leading a civilised life -

meaning especially health, education, and social

and environmental services. Citizenship confers

rights equally on all those entitled to them, and

thus offers a powerful counterbalance to the drive

of the capitalist market system towards

inequality. But citizenship helps legitimise


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inequalities arising from the necessary operation

of the market, and promotes "legitimate"

inequalities on its own account - notably through

selection in the education system and the

allocation of class-based residential

opportunities through the planning system.

Marshall thought the principled equality in common

access to the means of civilised living more

worthwhile than attempting to achieve equality of

outcome through redistribution (1992:33). Marshall

was not an egalitarian and was sceptical of

efforts to achieve equality of income by income

redistribution. What mattered was not equality (a

“relatively unimportant” aspect of social policy)

but “a general enrichment of the concrete

substance of civilised life” (1992:33). This

enrichment was not achieved by providing

additional cash to relatively disadvantaged groups

to enable them to compete on more equal terms in

the market - a project that could easily produce a

perverse outcome of disadvantaging the next group


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“up”, as he showed in his analysis of legal aid

(31). It was achieved by taking those services

which provided the “core” of the welfare system,

those which are “welfare’s strong suit and the

purest expression of its identity” (1981:133) out

of the market, and lodging them in institutions

whose professional staff would allocate services

outside the market place, to all or most of the

entire population. The courts of justice were

associated with civil rights, and parliament with

political rights. In the same way, the

“educational system and the social services” were

among the institutions particularly connected with

social rights (1992:8).

Active and Passive Citizenship

An alternative view argues against

Marshall’s concept of citizenship as a “status”

expressed in the bearing of rights. Oldfield

(1990) argued that citizenship should be seen as

action, not status. This he called a "republican"


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view, following the example of the ancient Greek

city states. Citizenship, he argues, is the

“unnatural practice” of participation. Prior,

Stewart and Walsh (1995) suggest following this

approach. In practice they, like Oldfield, allow

that participation can never be required of

everyone or enforced; rather they argue for the

development of an approach to government which is

rich in opportunity for citizen involvement, in

the context of a pluralistic society with a strong

voluntary and self help movement, an emphasis on

community, and encouragement for all to become

involved in some practical form of participation.

A common criticism of the rights-led view

of citizenship is that it renders the individual

“passive” without duties or moral obligations to

reciprocate rights (Roche, 1992). Does Marshall

consider the citizen primarily as a bearer of

rights whose discharge of personal duties to

"earn" those rights is irrelevant? Probably not:


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in puzzling over a difficult case (the right to

strike) he comments that if "citizenship is

involved in defence of rights, the corresponding

duties of citizenship cannot be ignored." But what

are these duties? - "that .. acts should be

inspired by a lively sense of responsibility

towards the welfare of the community." (1992:41).

This is demanding and rather vague. It is hard to

see how the citizen can have rights to defend

property, or to work or to vote, only to lose them

for failing to cannot display such high-minded

social motivation. But if we can acquit Marshall

of the charge of passivism, at any rate in

principle, in relation to civil and political

rights, it is clear that we must convict in the

case of social rights. Marshall's social rights

are a set of aspirations to confer the means of

civilised living on all citizens; the fulfilment

of that aim in any individual case or situation is

a different question. It is then a matter of

allocating resources, and this is for


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determination by officials who combine aspects of

both bureaucracy (applying rules) and

professionalism (exercising judgement) (1981:110).

"Individual rights must be subordinated to

national plans" (1992:35). A revealing confession

is found in his "Reflections on power" first

published in 1969:

As for social rights - the rights towelfare in the broadest sense of theterm - they are not designed for theexercise of power at all. They reflect,as I pointed out many years ago, thestrong individualist element in masssociety, but it refers to individuals asconsumers, not as actors... There islittle that consumers can do except toimitate Oliver Twist and "ask for more"(1981:141)

Much current discussion, both in theory

and policy, modifies Marshall's analysis of social

rights in this respect. A "central theme" in the

current recovery of citizenship is the call for

"democratic participatory rights in the

administration of welfare programmes" (Kymlicka

and Norman: 359). There are two aspects to this


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discussion. One concerns the impact of bureaucracy

on civil rights. Turner (1986:138) and Giddens

(1985:309) identify the problem that the

bureaucracy required to deliver social rights is

itself a source of surveillance and constraint

which impacts on civil rights - so that it might

be considered an instrument of citizenship which

will gradually cause citizenship itself to self

destruct. One remedy is "making bureaucracy more

responsive to individual, local or group

requirements" (Turner, 1986:138). The concern here

is to prevent social rights, however successfully

implemented, from eroding civil rights.

The other aspect is to do with the

performance of the state in delivering on its side

of the social rights bargain. Marshall had a

striking faith in the capacity of the welfare

bureaucracy to achieve success in terms of sheer

performance, and of the outcomes once adequate

resources are available. It is in this respect


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that Marshall seems most dated. He writes of the

families who move "into a model dwelling" so the

relative performance of their children at school

improves by a factor of nineteen, and of the

inequality that arises between this advance guard

and those still waiting their turn to move: but

reassures that "Eventually, when the housing

programme has been completed, such inequalities

should disappear." There is an element of "chance,

therefore of inequality" but only because

"individual claims must be subordinated into the

general programme of social advance" - the

necessary result of the fact that all cannot be

done at once. (1992:35-36).

User empowerment is thus an innovation in

Marshall’s model. His passive construction of the

user threatens both service quality and civil and

political rights. Hence the service user needs not

just a right to whatever social welfare provision

is made available by the state, but also to be


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“empowered” in relation to these services. This

empowerment can take different forms, including

rights to participate in the direction of

services, and rights to be have a certain standard

of service and choices in the service supplied.

The alternative view rejects Marshall’s

construction of the citizen as a bearer of rights.

Instead the citizen is an active participant and

all social and political institutions - including

welfare institutions - should stress and promote

this necessary activism. This “republican”

argument encounters the objection that the

“recovery of a strong participatory idea of

citizenship should not be made at the cost of

sacrificing individual liberty” (Mouffe 1992b:225)

Generally the new citizenship argument follows

Rawls and stresses the "priority of the right over

the good " (229) - citizens are entitled to reach,

and within limits to practice, their own version

of what they conclude to be good, which may lead


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them to conclude that they wish to be passive. To

put it another way, while it may be necessary for

citizenship to encompass and even promote the

virtue of activism, no one has any right to say

that the only citizen is an active one - and a

true citizen would concede the right of his or her

neighbour not to be active. On this view, citizen

activism will mostly be expressed in voluntary

participation in civil society - in a great

network of rather unglamorous voluntary action,

broadly regulated and protected by the state

(Wolzer 1992). The new citizenship endorses

"pluralism," the view that there is no collective

"good" and that pursuit of any good includes the

freedom for others not to share it (Mouffe 1992b).

This is distinguished from postmodern relativism

in that the sustenance of a pluralist society does

require the sharing of certain limits as to what

constitutes legitimate thought and action. As we

have seen, the new citizenship argument endorses

liberalism and constitutionalism, and "one of the


page 37

major theoretical phenomena of ours times is the

left's reconciliation with liberal rights"

(Kymlicka and Norman 1994:359n). The agenda for

the new citizenship has been a "wider engagement

between socialists and liberals" giving rise to a

new assessment of the relationship between

community and individual, liberty and equality

(Andrews 1991:14.)

The Marshallian citizen therefore survives

the new scrutiny in remaining a bearer of rights,

these rights being civil, political and social.

But for social rights to be sustained requires

greater activism on the part of users than the

Marshallian model allows. This is necessary both

to protect civil rights and to enable social

rights to be realised in practice, i.e. to deliver

reasonably equal services of acceptable quality.

But civil rights also require that activism cannot

be prescribed. The implication is that activism

should be permitted and promoted. There is a right


page 38

on the part of the citizen to be empowered; and a

duty on the part of the state and the citizenry

generally to sustain that right. But there is no

duty to participate, and to infer one is an

illegitimate interference with freedom.

Marshall and Giddens: Marshall as a social

theorist

Marshall was, in his own day, a somewhat

isolated figure: even though, with Titmuss, he was

one of the two most widely read writers on social

policy, he led no "school" of social

administration, a fact attributed to his non-

attachment to any of the three prevailing

ideological fashions - the parliamentary and the

marxian alternatives for outright, egalitarian

socialism, and the emerging new right. Instead he

was "almost the only major contributor to social

policy studies to have held that a modified form

of capitalist enterprise is not incompatible with

civilised forms of collectivist social policies"


page 39

(Pinker 1981: 8-9). It is not difficult to see why

Marshall's stock should have risen over the last

decade: as an "ethical socialist" (Halsey 1996:85)

not uncomfortable with the realities of

capitalism, and more interested in equality of

access to social necessities than of outcome in

terms of distributional justice, Marshall is a

commentator on the post war welfare state who is

also in some ways a prophet of late-century

Blairism. Marshall's successors in the left-

leaning social policy world at the London School

of Economics have grown sceptical of egalitarian

strategy (Le Grand 1982; Glennester 1990:20).

So far I have argued that with one major

innovation - a right to empowerment - the

Marshallian social citizen survives translation to

the 1990s context of the citizen set in civil

society rather than post-war socialism. However to

stand Marshall up as a theorist requires

considering the objections to the Marshallian

version of rights advanced by Anthony Giddens


page 40

(1982b; 1985; 1989). This discussion opens with a

brief account of Giddens’ overall theoretical

orientation. It then attempts to “sort out”

Giddens’ wide-ranging critical reworking of

Marshall. Finally it attempts to reinstate

Marshall in terms of Giddens’ overall theory. This

is perhaps somewhat ambitious but there seems no

way of avoiding dealing with Giddens’ formidable

critique of Marshall. Other comments on Marshall

in the light of Giddens’ critique are to be found

in Turner (1992: 3-38).

Giddens (1976;1982a; 1984) rejects the

functionalist and positivist traditions in

sociology, under which the purpose of social

enquiry is to discover "laws" which determine

social relationships and their outcomes. For

Giddens, society is made up of human agents who

are both capable and knowledgeable. That is to

say, they are "actors" (actions are not

predetermined; people have capacity to act other


page 41

than they do) and their actions are informed by

knowledge about society and the conditions of

their activity within it. This knowledge is of

three types: unconscious, practical and

discursive. Practical knowledge is that needed to

"go on" in social situations. Discursive

knowledge, also called reflexive knowledge, is

"held in the head" understanding. Social behaviour

is not determined but its patterns and structures

are established recursively, by the constantly

repeated behaviour which forms the "going on"

knowledge and which is then dictated by that

knowledge. People do not play "roles" but they do

cycle through different social settings in which

they learn, and apply, their social knowledge.

There are no social "laws" to be discovered, but

there are historical conjunctions of recurrent

behaviour, practical knowledge and the discursive

analysis that people apply to their social history

and settings. These conjunctions establish the

“boundedness” of possible action. But this


page 42

boundedness can be altered by the application of

knowledge.

Sociological knowledge is discursive

analysis that can, and will, be taken up by the

object of its study (society) and incorporated

into its own understanding of itself and the

boundaries of action. Giddens calls this the

"hinge" through which sociology becomes an

instrument either of domination or of

emancipation. Knowledge is a source of power and a

means of control. Sociological knowledge describes

to people what are the boundaries of the possible,

what action they can take and what the outcomes

will be. Sociology must take account of the social

knowledge which people hold about their own

situations. To research an area of social life is,

in principle, to be able to participate in that

area, in that the observer must know the "going

on" knowledge held by the actors who create that


page 43

area by their actions and their recursive

behaviour.

Giddens criticises Marshall for assuming

an “evolution” in rights from civil to political

to social (1982b171-173;1985:205; 1987:185-6).

This does not give sufficient space for the fact

that rights are “contested” and that certain

rights may be advanced by the authorities in order

to head off demands for others - which explains

why, contrary to Marshall’s model, welfare rights

may be provided in advance of political.

Marshall’s model is “internalist” (1989:269) - it

is deliberately intended to apply to only one

country, Britain. The combination of

“evolutionism” and “internalism” must banish

Marshall as a theorist to a dim part of Giddens’

firmament. Evolution implies functionalism - the

adaptation to an underlying historical necessity.

Functionalism is strongly rejected by Giddens:

“social systems have no needs” (1982a:10).


page 44

Functionalism which is also “internalist” implies

a kind of “Britishness” as a unique version of

historical determinism. However, Marshall was well

aware that social rights could develop in the

absence of other rights, and that rights were open

to contestation. This is clear in his discussion

of power and rights, which appeared in 1969 and

was included as chapter 7 in the 1981 collection

(1981:137-156). This essay also included extensive

international comparisons in the content and

development of rights. Marshall’s writings on

social policy include many references to the

detailed differences in welfare institutions

between countries and the way international

comparison affect the development of rights (for

example 1970: 49-50).

The connection between social rights and

social welfare institutions seems very clearly and

consistently spelt out in Marshall’s writings.


page 45

However Giddens (1985:203) suggests this

reworking:

The main institutional focus of theadministration of civil rights isthe legal system. Politicalcitizenship rights have as theirfocal point the institutions ofparliament and local government.The third - economic rights -apparently in Marshall’s eyes lacksuch an organisational location,which is perhaps why he chooses thediffuse term diffuse term ‘socialrights’ to refer to them.

Giddens fits this reworking into an

analysis of rights as the product of surveillance,

corresponding to his idea that, as government

becomes increasingly based on the ordering of

knowledge about its subjects, it becomes

increasingly impractical to govern by coercion and

instead it becomes necessary to gain the consent

of subjects, who are then able to gain rights and

discursively to constitute political order. Civil

rights correspond to surveillance as policing, and

political rights to the “reflexive monitoring of

state administrative power.” Economic rights -


page 46

Giddens’ revision of social rights - are

“Surveillance as ‘management’ of production.” The

focus for the contestation of civil rights is the

courts, and for political rights the parliamentary

or council chamber - although in both cases there

are other locations for contestation and the

discursive contestation of rights. For economic

(social) rights the

lack of an institutionalised courtof appeal .. reflects phenomena ofmajor significance in the classstructure of capitalism. The mainorganized agency of struggle overeconomic rights is the union and itis in the mechanics of industrialarbitration that we find thesettings of contestation inrelation to this type ofsurveillance” (1985:206).

Clearly this takes us a very long way from

Marshall and social rights as he conceived them.

The journey Giddens makes here can be traced to

his analysis of “economic civil rights” and

“industrial citizenship” where Marshall (1992:41-

42) argues that if unions wish to invoke civil


page 47

rights in defence of a right to strike (i.e. to

breach a civil contract), then they have to accept

wider obligations of “industrial citizenship”

which implies a degree of regulation of the right

to strike. Giddens prefers to approach “economic

civil rights” from a marxist perspective, locating

the development of the labour contract in a

context of class conflict rather than civil

rights; the implication seems to be that the right

to strike should be analysed as a legitimate

instrument of class-based claims rather than as a

matter of civil rights (Giddens 1982b:172). In the

1985 discussion, the issue of “economic civil

rights” displaces social rights completely. Trying

to make sense of this, Held (1989:169) reworks

Giddens to allow four types of rights, and

reinstates Marshall’s social rights (with some

uncertainty) within a revised version of Giddens.

But Giddens’ response (1989) does not clarify what

he thinks of social rights.


page 48

I think it is possible to recover Marshall

as a theorist and to set his theory in

“Giddensian” terms - once it is recognised that

Marshall was not a functionalist. It makes more

sense to see Marshall as working from a

theoretical foundation that anticipates the temper

of late-century sociology, which rejects

"objectivist theory ... where human agency appears

only as the determined outcome of social causes"

(Giddens 1982a:8). Marshall finds citizenship

constructed in successive waves of rights-

development, lodged in a historical context where

new generations interpret and learn to transcend

constraints in the structures they inherit - or as

he put it: "a human society can make a square meal

out of a stew of paradox without getting

indigestion - at least for quite a long time."

(1992:49). His starting point is the reflection by

the nineteenth century economist Alfred Marshall

on the potential for a liberal social order with

advanced technology to offer all its people the


page 49

opportunities and standards of "gentlemen" - a

term which the later Marshall thought could be

translated "citizen" without too much strain.

Alfred Marshall would not have countenanced the

economic socialism which offered the historical

context for the achievement of social rights in

Britain. But there is an undercurrent in T. H.

Marshall's interpretation of the alliance of

social rights and socialism. Civil and political

rights conferred by the pre-socialist order

expected to achieve an equality of access to the

means of civilisation, and thus created a climate

in which equality was a legitimate aim of public

policy. Class distribution made this equal access

unachievable in practice. Social rights, and

socialist political economy, were both outcomes

not only of working class enfranchisement

(political rights) but also and perhaps more

fundamentally of citizenship itself with its quest

for equal access to the essentials of social

belonging (1992:24). Equality of access to the


page 50

means of citizenship (the agenda of social rights)

and equality of distributional outcome (the agenda

of socialist political economy) in practice became

entangled with one another, so that the emergence

of the latter made the former more readily

accomplished. The alternative implied historical

possibility is that social rights could be

legitimised and achieved by a sustained

interrogation of civil and political rights in the

context of a liberal social order: a “Giddensian”

application of social knowledge to transcend the

“boundedness” of historical structure.

Current citizenship debate includes an

analysis of the failure of state-imposed equality

to achieve outcomes acceptable either in terms of

economic performance or political liberty. In one

version, the political theory of citizenship

proposes a "radical democratic citizenship"

sustaining a demand on liberal society to take its

own stated objects seriously (Mouffe 1992a). In


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Marshall we find an implication that citizenship

has the capacity to develop social rights in a

non-socialist order. We can find this expressed in

Mouffe's expectation that the underlying values of

socialist democracy are properly expressed and

outworked in interrogation of the liberal version

of citizenship. Social rights are thus

comprehended and developed within a capitalist

society's constant self interrogation, urged upon

it by the bearers of certain social values. These

values originate in capitalism; the “expansion of

citizenship from ascription to achievement”

(Turner 1986:135) was both a condition and an

outcome of its development. Underlying Marshall’s

theory is an analysis of equality of status as a

demand that capitalism legitimises. This demand

then tests the boundaries of what is achievable,

questioning how far equality can be pressed before

the conditions of its own discursive existence -

economic and political liberty - are threatened or

the market system undermined.


page 52

Giddens’ reworking of Marshall appears to

derive (i) from his assumption that Marshall is a

“evolutionalist” (or functionalist) and (ii) that

having dismissed a functionalist account of rights

we can reinstate Marshall’s finding in terms of

surveillance. To reduce Marshall’s account of

social rights and social institutions to the

supervision of labour seems however to reinstate a

functional explanation. Giddens suggests that

moves to participation are “always - in greater or

lesser degree, and with various admixtures of

other aims - oriented towards redressing

imbalances of power involved in surveillance”

(1985:314). In an earlier work (1976:113) he wrote

that the “reflexive elaboration of frames of

meaning is characteristically imbalanced in

relation to the possession of power.” A teasing

thought is prompted by the growth of participatory

responses to housing policy. From the work of

Dennis (1970; 1972) it is clear that residents


page 53

became particularly incensed when they realised,

not just the extent of “knowledge” possessed by

the authorities, but its chronic inaccuracy -

whether related to the condition or location of

their homes or the aspirations of residents whose

homes were to be demolished (Dennis 1972:147).

Dennis argued for basic sociological techniques -

such as surveys - to be used at least to achieve a

certain routine accuracy in the “knowledge”

deployed for housing policy. It is arguable that

had “surveillance” been conducted more

competently, its application would have been

better received. As it was the imbalance of power

became most clearly apparent to residents when

they were forced to probe its unacceptable

outcomes.

This discussion has proposed a view of T.

H. Marshall as a figure of continuing relevance.

His concept of citizenship as based on rights, and

of the “social citizen” as a bearer of social


page 54

rights, has been defended. It has also been

proposed that it is not correct to see his model

as “evolutionary” or has having unique application

to one country. Social rights are a product not of

functional necessity but of social life,

knowledgeably constituted by social actors. If

this view is correct then we should expect to find

international research exploring the local

constitution of welfare in a citizenship-based

perspective. We refer in the next chapter to the

contribution of Soss (1996) who acknowledges the

strong influence of Marshall in framing his own

understanding in the US context of the empowered

service user making welfare claims within a

considered strategy for gaining control over life

choices. Other work of interest comes from Lindbom

(1995) who stresses the differences in welfare

models between Scandinavian states, comparing the

user activism expected in Denmark with the passive

citizen in Sweden; and from Sheweel (1995) on the

promotion of citizen activism in welfare provision


page 55

in Canadian Indian reserves and its tension with

claims for political autonomy. There is much to be

gained from a fuller understanding of the social

construction of the citizen, especially in an

international comparative context. This would

enable a fuller analysis of Giddens’ account of

rights and the role of “surveillance” in

constructing those rights - and in extending those

rights to include a right of user empowerment.

Conclusion to chapter 2: rights-based social

citizenship today

This chapter has argued that current

circumstances are adding “a right to empowerment”

to Marshall’s theory of citizenship. This is a

response to deficiencies in both performance and

democratic substance in state welfare services. An

alternative understanding is to reject a rights

based theory of citizenship in favour of an action

based theory of the citizen as participant, but

this is incompatible with the principles of


page 56

liberty and equality that underpin the citizenship

revival. Marshall’s concept of rights is not

functionalist or evolutionist, but belongs within

an understanding of society as constituted by

knowledgeable agents reflexively monitoring their

history.


page 57

Chapter 3

Empowerment, participation and consumption

The purpose of this chapter is to

establish the typology of empowerment - to say

what we mean by the users of public services

gaining "power." The chapter will consider the

significance of ideas such as choice,

participation, consultation and control: whether

all these are "empowering" and if so in what way.

It will examine three models of user empowerment,

those by Cairncross et al (1994) on tenant

participation in housing; Prior et al (1995) on

citizen models in local government; and Woods

(1995) on school parent-governors. These models

study a diverse range of activities and

structures.

Power, empowerment and disempowerment


page 58

It is important first to consider what

"power" means and consequently what we make of

terms like "empowerment" and "disempowerment." The

sociology of power is often considered difficult

and some writers on user involvement have

preferred to point out difficulties without

offering a solution (for example Richardson,

1983:26; Stewart and Taylor, 1995:11), leaving

readers to draw their own conclusions about the

significance of their findings for theory and

practice. However it is not satisfactory to

attempt to analyse social practices that are said

to "empower" without some guidance as to what

"power" is. The guidance that follows is sought

from Giddens (1976; 1984) and Clegg (1989), both

of whom draw widely on the findings of recent

sociology. This very brief account includes some

simplification, with the aim of deriving informed

and viable understanding of what power is when we

come to a detailed survey of the components of

"empowerment" in the delivery of social welfare.


page 59

For Giddens (1976:110; 1984:14-16) power

is fundamentally a property of individual human

action or "agency". He analyses three aspects of

power. These are:

first and most widely, "the capability of

the actor to intervene in a series of events so

as to alter their course" in accordance with the

actor's wishes;

second and "in the narrower, relational

sense ... the capability to secure outcomes

where these outcomes depend on the agency of

others" (1976:111)

and third the ability to manage meaning,

explained by Giddens as follows:

The reflexive elaboration of framesof meaning is characteristicallyimbalanced in relation to thepossession of power, whether thisbe a result of the superiorlinguistic or dialectical skills ofone person in conversation withanother; the possession of relevanttypes of “technical knowledge”; the


page 60

mobilisation of authority or“force”, etc.

(Giddens, 1976:113).

A "frame of meaning" is any human being's

way of interpreting the facts that stream into to

him or her all the time. We group facts together

and give them an explanation. "Reflexive

elaboration" refers to the way that we constantly

check (Giddens would say "monitor") our frames of

meaning and develop, strengthen or change them in

line with our experience and thinking.

For Giddens everyone has power who has the

ability to "act." Summarising Giddens, power is

the ability to change a course of events in

accordance with one's wishes; to recruit others to

share in this endeavour; and to control and impose

meaning.


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Clegg sees power as a property of

organisation (1989:17.) Agency, for Clegg, is

achieved by human relationships, rather than being

(as Giddens suggests) the individual's capacity

for action. He sees society as a field in which

many different kinds of organisational

relationships are working, constantly achieving

the various purposes for which people get

together. This field is "fixed, coupled and

constituted" by "nodal points" - alternatively

called "obligatory passage points" - which become

"privileged in this unstable and shifting

terrain." Clegg derives the term "nodal points"

from Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and "obligatory

passage points" from Callon (1986). Both terms

"refer to the construction of a conduit through

which traffic must pass. Power consists in part in

the achievement of this positionality" (1989:204-

5). Power is understood as the outcome of more or

less complex organisations interacting with each

other to produce their desired outcomes.


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There are important differences between

Clegg and Giddens. Clegg considers Giddens to be a

"subjectivist" in identifying agency as a property

of human capability rather than of relationships,

and in his treatment of human knowledge as having

a fundamental transforming capacity. However there

are significant similarities in their treatment of

power. In their overall scheme, both writers

reject determinism and functionalism, according to

which society is ultimately controlled by some

underlying historical masterplan. There is no

permanent shape of social domination, no

overarching ideological control, although

temporary developments may confirm an appearance

of such domination.

Power is the achievement of desired

outcomes (Giddens 1984:257; Clegg 1989:208). The

analysis of power is not concerned with attempting

(as an earlier commentator, Lukes, argued) to


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discern "real" interests (Clegg 1989:15,204;

Giddens 1984:15). Power is subject to a dialectic

- what Giddens (1984:16) calls the "dialectic of

control in social systems" whereby "all forms of

dependence offer some resources whereby those who

are subordinate can influence the activities of

their superiors." Agencies extend their power by

delegation; but delegation reduces the power of

those who "empower" others to act on their behalf.

To achieve outcomes agents must recruit other

agents; in the process they necessarily sacrifice

some of their own power in a "dialectic of power"

(Clegg 1989:208). Empowerment is not (necessarily)

a "zero sum game" in which, for one party to gain

in power, another must correspondingly lose (Clegg

1989:232.) The control of meaning is important in

creating power and reproducing it as domination

(Clegg 215).

It follows that "disempowerment" is a term

to handle cautiously. To be disempowered cannot


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mean to be without power, unless this means

lacking any capacity for action (Giddens) and/or

not being enlisted into a variety of

organisational settings (Clegg). Much contemporary

commentary links "disempowerment" with "isolation,

dependency, marginalisation and exclusion"

(Stewart and Taylor 1995:64) typically understood

as reliance on bureaucratically controlled social

welfare and distance from political engagement. Of

course there are important facts contained within

this characterisation.

But Soss (1996), researching welfare

claimants in the USA, argues for a more complex

and subtle picture. He finds that the decision to

claim welfare benefits is a considered one whereby

claimants take more control over areas of their

lives, using state resources to "escape control of

others (or the market)" (Soss 1996:309). The idea

of welfare provision as asserting state control

over disempowered users is simplistic and


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misleading; claimants establish relations with

welfare bureaucracies in a two-way process in

which their "unwanted claims" on the state are a

more significant act of political engagement than

recognised forms of political participation.

Claimants build their understanding of the state

and of politics from their relationships with the

welfare system. Soss's study was conducted by

developing a long-term relationship with fifty

claimants and gaining personal understanding of

the way welfare provision looks and feels to the

claimant. He is informed by what Giddens (1982a:9)

calls the "going on knowledge" of the subject.

From this perspective Soss recognises the

unreality both of notions of the user as just

disempowered and dependent, and academic theories

of political engagement which neglect the

political dimension of welfare.

To understand "empowerment" as moving an

agent up a vertical axis marked "nil power" at the


page 66

bottom is unlikely to describe most of the

situations which the concept addresses.

Empowerment may be an appropriate tool in a wide

range of settings with different purposes. For

example, agents within state organisations may

explore empowerment as a means to encourage users

to manage demands upon the state in more

acceptable ways, much as managers in firms may

"empower" employees with the aim of making the

business more productive. The state apparatus will

contain numerous agencies with varying ends in

mind when they consider "empowerment" of users.

Political agents may be concerned with empowerment

as a mutual learning tool, recognising not only

that service users acquire their political

education very substantially from interaction with

service delivery agents, but also that providers

themselves derive and apply political lessons in

this interface. Users have an active picture of

what they "want" and how the system works in

facilitating or preventing fulfilment. They may


page 67

often come from settings where local relationships

have been disrupted and there are latent networks

of skills and representation that can be

"energised" by empowering strategies that begin by

raising confidence in these local assets (Stewart

and Taylor 1995:65).

Empowerment may offer users a strategy to

deliver wanted changes; if it succeeds we may say

with Giddens that users have been "empowered." But

following Clegg, we also recognise that this route

is a complex two-way process, in which users will

sacrifice some pieces of power in order to become

"empowered" in their relations with other

agencies. Users will develop new agencies

themselves in this process, which will set out in

the process of enrolment and structuring

"obligatory passage points" not only with the

outside world but among users themselves.

Empowerment is, not surprisingly, an alarming and


page 68

many sided strategy for those who have adapted to

the condition of being "disempowered."

Why ladders don’t work

There are many accounts of user

empowerment which arrange possible relationships

between providers and users into a classification.

An early and much quoted one is

"Arnstein's ladder of participation" (Stewart and

Taylor 1995:16) This ladder has eight "rungs".

Read from the bottom they are

Manipulation

Therapy

Informing

Consultation

Placation

Partnership

Delegate power


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Citizen control

This idea of a "ladder” is misleading in

three ways. First, the purpose of a ladder is to

reach its top: so Arnstein's picture can be read

to mean that all projects of user involvement have

as their purpose reaching a summit of "control."

But many users, and user groups, may legitimately

prefer "levels" of involvement that do not entail

control (Stewart and Taylor 1995:17.) Second, with

a ladder, one rung leads to another. It is not

possible to leap straight to the top: one climbs

up one rung at a time, or two at most. But many

user groups may wish to develop control without

first going through processes of being

manipulated, informed, placated and so on. Part of

the point of Arnstein's language is to show that

some practices identified are disempowering.

Putting people on such "rungs" will not build the

confidence which is a prerequisite if people are

to be empowered (Stewart and Taylor 1995:65).


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Third, with a ladder, the climber only stays on

one rung at a time. To attempt to stand

simultaneously on the top and the lower rungs of

an eight-rung ladder would be dangerous. But a

group that exercised "control" without also being

"informed" would quickly fail.

So Arnstein's ladder is misleading in that

it implies that some alternatives are superior

even though users may value them less highly; that

users should proceed through a succession of

"lower" to "higher" forms; and that some

activities are mutually exclusive alternatives

when in fact they are mutually complementary and

to be pursued together.

Three models of empowerment

This chapter continues with a

consideration of three typologies of user

empowerment: by Cairncross et al (1994) on tenant


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participation in housing; Prior et al (1995) on

citizen models in local government; and Woods

(1995) on the action and motivation of school

parent-governors.

While there are other typologies that

could be considered also, these three have a

number of common strengths. None uses the "ladder"

concept so each recognises that users have a range

of alternative routes to involvement, without

inferring a cycle from one to another or presuming

that one is superior.

Each is strong on practitioner

understanding: so meets the requirement of

understanding the "going on knowledge" (Giddens,

1982). The work by Cairncross et al is by a (then)

practitioner with two academics, and is based on

work undertaken for the English Tenant

Participation Advisory Service (TPAS, 1990). The


page 72

work by Prior et al is also that of a practitioner

(in local government) and two academics. Woods

works for the United Kingdom National Consumer

Council.

Each has a strong theoretical frame:

Caincross et al in locating their work in a

critical appreciation of theories of power,

especially that of Clegg; Prior et al in

theoretical concepts of Citizenship, especially

those of Marshall (1992) and Oldfield (1990); and

Woods in an ideal-type model of the "Citizen-

consumer" based on a critical review of the

theories of the two types of actor.

Two of the models are strongly researched

empirically. Cairncross et al have tested and

refined their model through extensive surveys of

tenant participation practices in local

government, supported by the Joseph Rowntree


page 73

Foundation; and Woods has made two surveys of

school parent-governors, in 1988 and 1992.

The research of Caincross et al found that

in 1990, 80% of local authorities with public

housing had arrangements for tenant participation,

of which a majority had "formal" structures such

as established committees or regular meetings.

They classify councils into those with a

"traditional" relationship with tenants

(essentially confined to informing them, with more

ambitious participation occurring only during

modernisation or tackling particular local

problems); "consumerist" authorities seeking to

establish a "commercial" relationship emphasising

choice and research into tenant views; and

"citizenship" authorities stressing representative

structures and collective involvement through

tenant associations and committees. They identify

"processes" of participation, "structures" (or

types of activity) that procure these and


page 74

"objectives" of local authority housing providers

(the "objectives" of tenants are, in all cases,

given as "better housing.") The findings, set out

in figure 1, suggest that tenants are offered

either choice or collective participation (or

possibly neither - but not both) depending on the

political orientation of the local authority. The

researchers report from case study evidence that

what they call "citizenship" councils establish

council-wide structures that incorporate tenant

participation into "obligatory passage points"

that empower tenant leaderships according to their

alignment to council politics:

Citizenship is founded on theposition of citizens in currentsocial democratic thinking, whichentails allowing them someinfluence but not collectivecontrol. The citizenship approachcan be criticised for incorporatingtenants into the decision makingprocess while giving them littlecapacity to influence their housingcircumstances

(Caincross et al, 1994:200).


page 75

The authors believe this may change as

"social democratic thinking" moves towards user

rather than state control. This still leaves a

position where the choices open to resident are

limited by the current dispositions of power

holders in the state apparatus. From this

perspective council housing remains locked into

the circuits of power that run through the local

authority. The implication is that empowerment

occurs only by taking control, which Cairncross et

al identify as "not really" participation. This

analysis is not grounded on any theory of

citizenship. "Citizenship" is taken to be

represented by the practices of political actors

who promote participative rather than "commercial"

models of tenant participation.

Prior et al (1995) employ a different

approach grounded in a critical review of

alternative models of citizenship. The Marshallian

rights-based model promotes a "passive" and


page 76

dependent citizen whose "rights" are contested. In

search of a more empowering model, citizenship has

been redefined, largely successfully, by neo-

liberals as "consumerist citizenship" where the

defining activity of the citizen is "choice" (15).

While its ideal mechanism is the competitive

market, an acceptable alternative is a "market

orientation" for public services including

contracting out of services to theprivate sector, performance relatedpay, and greater accountability tocitizens by means of publishedperformance standards, independentinspection, complaints proceduresand compensation for servicefailure. The citizen is empoweredas a consumer by being givenspecific rights: to receiveinformation on standards andperformance, to have individualneeds addressed, to assert choicesand preferences, to complain and toreceive redress. (15)

It is a "market oriented approach,

constituting citizens as customers" (3).


page 77

These writers thus follow Cairncross et al

in depicting a "commercial" model of public

service equating consumer and customer in a

typology of empowerment built around individual

rights to service and redress for failure. However

unlike Cairncross et al they see this as a version

of "citizenship" originating in the rights-based

welfare model and its need for enhancement to

counter passivity. They perceive an alternative

citizenship grounded in civic republicanism

(Oldfield, 1990). Citizenship on this basis is

action, not status. Citizenship consists not in

bearing rights but in participative action. They

recognise the danger identified by Mouffe in the

incipient totalitarianism of the republican

pursuit of the common good, and offer two

"modifications" to the republican model:

emphasising first "the process of participation

rather than its assumed goal" and second that this

"process of participation must be founded on ..

the integrity of individual beliefs, interests and


page 78

aspirations." However, while "rights are

necessary to safeguard ... individuals in the

process of social interaction, they cannot be a

basis for individuals to contract in or out of

that social interaction" (19).

Their resulting model - what they call an

"analytic framework" for citizen participation

(123) - is thus less a descriptive one of current

practice than an aspirational one based on their

actionist model of citizenship. It is summarised

in figure 2. The foundation is the "requirements

of citizen participation" in the first column.

These can be operated at different "levels of

decision making" (the second column), serving a

variety of users (column 3). Finally there are

three main sets of "mechanism" each with a sub-set

(column 4): these correspond to the "processes" in

the Cairncross model. Interestingly, the model

includes "consumerist" citizenship rights,

incorporating requirements such as Accountability


page 79

and Redress and mechanisms such as choice,

specifically including choice between service

providers. These are now integrated into a wider

range of choices, opportunities and devices which

emphasise participative ways to hold government to

account - consumerism is "only one approach" among

many others that need to be available (145).

Within this framework the role of local government

is to enable citizens to realise the rights and

entitlements that they have, and to represent the

needs of local citizens to agencies elsewhere in

the political and social system (158). In more

detail, the local authority builds an

"infrastructure for citizenship" around sustaining

individual rights; delivering services in ways

that minimise dependency; creating opportunities

for active self-help; developing collective

community action; enabling participation; and

providing leadership (147-148).


page 80

This is a rich vision of "citizenship"

government. While its starting point is critical

both of rights-based and consumerist models of

citizenship, the discussion develops a model which

incorporates and arguably enhances these versions

of empowerment within a diverse framework of

opportunity. The discussion is grounded on a

"republican" concept of citizenship in which

participation is a requirement of social

membership (19). But the outworking of the model

stresses enabling and opportunity, rather than the

penalising or stigmatising of the uninvolved.

Prior et al follow Cairncross et al in

identifying "citizenship" with "participation."

Cairncross et al perceive this as limited by the

current aspirations of "social democracy" as

practised, and do not identify a "consumerist"

alternative with any citizenship tradition. Prior

et al develop their approach from a critique of

the Marshallian model of citizenship, and


page 81

recognise "consumerism" as offering a viable model

of citizenship with identifiable origins in

citizenship as status. The participative

alternative, while aspiring to a fully outworked

concept of citizenship as practice, is embedded in

a wider web of rights and opportunities.

Citizenship thus empowers - a possibility that

exists only on the margins of the Cairncross

model.

Woods (1995) develops a model of actions

based on what he calls an ideal type of the

citizen-consumer. This has its origins especially

in research into consumption of social and welfare

goods and services, by the UK National Consumer

Council. From this research and experience Woods

develops four "consumer empowerment models":

competitive market (empowerment of consumer

through choice between competing producers)


page 82

personal control (the empowered consumer

actively checks, changes and works on goods or

services)

quality assurance (consumer empowerment by

requiring providers to follow authorised

specifications)

participation (consumers empowered by

interaction with providers) (Woods, 1995:79-80)

Further work produces the classification

of citizen-consumer action listed on figure 3.

This expands on the "empowered consumer" model by

establishing a set of actions which apply the

model to school parent governors. The expansion of

the model takes account of three ways in which the

research progresses from the "empowered consumer"

to the "citizen-consumer." First, the citizen-

consumer "acts as a member of the political

community" (section A in figure 3.) adding a

particular "citizenship" dimension to the model.


page 83

Second, the citizen-consumer has various

"representative" functions which reflect what

Woods calls the "conceptually interesting" fact

that the empowered consumer, on the governing body

of a school, is both a provider and a consumer

representative (137). Thus, as well as (for

example) choosing and checking, the governor

encourages and enables other parents to choose and

check also, in relation to their own spheres of

competence. The third addition is in section G,

intended to measure whether citizen-consumers see

themselves as less empowered than others.

The model is tested through surveys which

research how parent governors see themselves and

what they do against the "ideal type" of the

citizen-consumer around which figure 3. is built.

Woods appears to have produced, and tested

a "researchable" model of user empowerment, which


page 84

could be adapted without difficulty to other

spheres, such as housing (applying the approach

to, for example, tenant management organisations

and "partnership" forums would be interesting.)

The list of actions set out in sections B to F of

the table is particularly valuable in classifying

the functions of the empowered user under the

headings:

Choice

Decisions ("doing")

Checking

Applying (standards)

Participating

and in producing a sub-set of

"representative" functions under each head,

including:

providing other users with choices and

information


page 85

promoting opportunities for others to become

involved in decisions, especially as they affect

their own household

enabling other users to make checks and apply

standards

enabling other users to participate

The model is less successful in sections A

and G, which are the additional dimensions Woods

adds in progressing from the NCC "empowered

consumer" model to the citizen-consumer model. His

research shows that governors do not analyse their

own empowerment in the terms he suggests (217.)

They do not, in their role as parent governors,

take the actions associated particularly with

membership of a political community, although they

do approve of the principle (216).

Citizenship, collective consumption and public

goods


page 86

There are problems in Woods' model that

derive from his development of "citizenship." He

argues that Marshall's "social element of

citizenship is concerned with those services that

are most likely to fall within the sphere of

collective consumption" and develops the

citizen/consumer debate as alternative left/right

perspectives on the type of empowerment that is

appropriate for this type of good or service (65

ff.) Woods knows the difficulties presented by

Castells' idea of collective consumption and tries

to resolve these by falling back on Lojkine's

(1976) attempt to rationalise this as a typology

of goods and services that require to be consumed

in a certain collective social setting (42 ff.) He

acknowledges the problem this creates, i.e. that a

"good or service is not inherently collective or

inherently private in the way it is used" (44) but

still tries to defend this treatment of collective

consumption by modifying it "dimensionally" so

that goods or services can be classified as


page 87

tending nearer or further from a fully private or

socialised mode of consumption (47). Thus for

example children taught in school are consuming

collectively but at home they do so privately.

Citizenship modes of empowerment, being concerned

with collective action, work through the political

arena (71ff). Hence a fundamental distinction

arises between citizen and consumer empowerment,

corresponding to collective and private ends on a

consumption spectrum.

There are fundamental problems with this

approach. Castells' notion of "collective

consumption" referred only incidentally to

different types of goods or services. It sought to

reconcile marxist theory on the long run

relationship between wages and subsistence with

high rates of consumption, especially state-

sponsored consumption, in late capitalism: thus

Forrest (1991:169) describes the theory of

collective consumption as "shorthand for what


page 88

Marxists once said about state provision and that

proved to be false." Lokjine's attempt to derive

"collective" significance from economic

transactions on the basis of the social

configurations formed among users at the point of

consumption made little sense even on its own

terms (Pinch 1989). The link with Marshallian

welfare rights is even less credible. Health,

education, housing or other "social" services are

not "consumed" any more "collectively" than, for

example, package holidays, sports events or ice

cream - arguably less so. In Marshall's terms,

these goods and services are provided

"collectively" (i.e. allocated on non-market

criteria) because their consumption is thought

essential to the means of participation in

civilised life.

Woods' difficulties are compounded by his

construction of the consumer and lack of a

distinction between public and private goods. He


page 89

rejects the "narrow" definition of consumer

empowerment as choice between alternative

suppliers in a competitive market, in favour of

the National Consumer Council's definition (from

NCC publications in 1977 and 1989) as including

the

users of public and social servicesas well as the purchasers ofcommercial goods and services ... apatient in a hospital, a libraryuser, a commuter is just as much aconsumer as someone buying awashing machine. A consumer issomeone who pays for goods andservices in taxes, through thecommunity charge and inprofessional fees, as well asacross the counter. A consumer issomeone whose choices, added to thechoices of other consumers,determine the social cost ofconsumption and its impact on othersections of the community and onpeople in the world beyond

(40-41)

While this is clearly adequate to the

remit of the NCC, it offers a poor guide to

defining the rights of service users. If taxpayers

and voters generally are as much consumers as


page 90

direct users, then it is worth asking whether

parent governors of schools are empowered as

"consumers" in any way that differs from appointed

local authority representatives. Is there no

conceptual distinction between the user of a

public service, the private buyer of a product,

and a citizen who supports a range of services by

voting and taxation - and if so, what about those

who do not vote or pay taxes?

In answering these questions, it is first

necessary to be clear about the difference between

public and private goods - a point on which Woods

is by no means the only writer to have

difficulties. Public goods are goods and services

that cannot be provided by the market because

there is no practical way for an entrepreneur to

exclude non-payers from their use (Mishan, 1976).

Well known examples include defence, public health

(for example clean air) and many types of highway

and footpath. These are "public" goods because


page 91

private demand ("I am prepared to pay £1,000 per

year in order significantly to reduce the risk of

foreign invasion by air, land or sea") could not

be met by a private business since there is no way

to limit the benefits to those who choose to pay

("Dear Sir or Madam, the Royal Navy regrets to

inform you that minesweeping services will not be

available to your address this year unless you

renew your subscription."). It is not only or even

mainly a matter of the nature of the good itself.

In principle, many public goods or services could

be private - but there are "transaction costs" to

achieve this in erecting a "turnstile". A motorway

is public until it has toll booths. A footpath can

be private but it has to be fenced with some sort

of ticketing arrangement.

"Public goods" are an economic matter, to

do with the technical non-feasibility of meeting

demand through the market. There is a different

idea conveyed in the term "public good" meaning a


page 92

common purpose which a society as a whole judges

to be right. Marquand (1988:216) distinguishes

between "public goods, in the plural" and "public

good in the singular." For example, education is a

public good (singular) in the sense that society

is agreed that all citizens should be educated, if

necessary through compulsion. It is not a public

good (plural) since it can be supplied through the

market (and often is).

Education, health and housing are private

goods - there is no technical reason why they

cannot be provided by an entrepreneur in response

to effective private demand. That they are

provided in a different way is a choice that

society makes about the mechanisms that should

govern their allocation. Marshall's theory

explains why society makes that choice ("they are

constructed as an essential aspect of citizenship;

advanced capitalist societies promote certain

equalities in relationship to citizenship even


page 93

while promoting inequality through class and the

market"). Castells' (1976) theory offers a

different explanation ("they are necessary for the

reproduction of labour power; advanced capitalist

societies follow marxist theory by reducing the

cost of labour to its subsistence rate, but this

subsistence rate is high, because of the labour

skills, health and accessibility that capital

requires. Accordingly private business offloads

these very high costs onto the state").

It would be possible to devote

considerable space to analysing the various kinds

of consumer, customer and stakeholder interest

that are packed into the NCC quotation - for

example, whether the interests of taxpayers are

best met by public representation on school boards

or by various kinds of regulation and performance

monitoring; whether the interests of prospective

tenants are properly protected when current

tenants are involved in housing allocations


page 94

policies; in what sense victims of crime, suspects

and prisoners are all "customers" of police

services; and so on. These are interesting

questions both theoretically and practically. Of

the models considered here, that of Prior et al -

the one written primarily from a local government

perspective - is the one that creates space for

these interests to be considered. It would be a

distraction to become immersed further in these

questions now.

The main point to make here concerns

Woods' treatment of consumer and citizen

interests. He widens the "consumer empowerment"

model (figure 3) to embrace "membership of a

political community" (section A) in the belief

that this addresses the citizenship dimension. The

list in section A includes some "consumer"

functions (especially Aii and Aiii). But in terms

of "seeking to influence relevant policies" (Ai

and Aiv) the citizen who is a user of a particular


page 95

service is in the same position as any other

citizen. The research questionnaire asks if the

parent-governor tries "to influence political

authorities ... on educational matters" and "to

involve parents in influencing political

authorities" (359). Educational policy is arguably

a matter for the entire polity: the right place to

influence it is the ward meeting or the voting

booth. While users and providers may clearly have

expertise and energy to offer, it is important

that these should be offered in a way that

procures accountability to the polity. It is at

least arguable that there is no particular reason

why consumer representatives in service delivery

organisations should have any greater interest in

policy and political questions than anyone else,

and that to develop models that are predisposed to

expect such an interest is potentially

discriminatory and possibly even corrupting. It is

true, as Walzer (1992:105) says, that "civil

society is tested in its capacity to produce


page 96

citizens whose interests, at least sometimes,

reach further than themselves and their comrades,

who look after the political community that

fosters and protects the associational networks"

and it is also true that this capacity may

occasionally be nurtured within the associational

structure, but it is a confusion to see this as

the sole "citizenship" dimension of the empowered

consumer association.

Woods' model is strongest where it is

derived from empirical work on consumer

empowerment. The attempt to add an additional

citizen dimension is unconvincing and, probably,

weakens the model. In Marshallian terms, users'

"citizenship" is already acknowledged in the

status they possess as user-consumers of the

service. Their empowerment as political citizens

is acknowledged in rights to participate in the

political process. The case for their empowerment

as social citizens bases itself on their ability


page 97

to improve service quality and (summarising,

perhaps crudely, the argument of Prior et al) to

enrich their own, and others', experience of

community life and organisation. Woods offers a

powerful analytic and research tool based on the

empirically-developed NCC model of the "empowered

consumer." The concept of citizenship into which

it fits needs more examination.

The three models we have examined offer

varying analyses of empowerment, consumption (or

consumerism) and citizenship. The first two -

Caincross et al on housing, and Prior et al on

local government - connect "participation" with

"citizenship." For Woods, the connection is more

strongly between "participation" and "consumer

empowerment." For Cairncross et al,

"participation" is a mode of incorporation with

limited potential for empowerment. For Prior et

al, both participation and consumerism are modes

of empowerment, but a developed practice of


page 98

participation is particularly important to the

revitalisation of citizen empowerment through the

reinvigoration of local democracy. These

relationships are illustrated in figure 4.

The next step is to examine the meaning of

"participation" and the "consumer" in more

critical depth.

Empowerment through participation

"Participation" is an ambiguous term,

because the same word is used to refer to

different phenomena. It means "taking part" and

most obviously refers to actively joining in the

work of an organisation, especially taking part in

meetings to make decisions. However it is used

generally to cover all the processes that might

enable the views of users and potential users to

be reflected in the decision-making process. The


page 99

agencies and resources that exist to promote such

involvement often use the word "participation" to

identify themselves - as, in housing, with the

Tenant Participation Advisory Service, the Tenant

Participation Branch of the Department of

Environment, Transport and Regions, Tenant

Participation officers in provider organisations,

Tenant Participation grants and policies, and so

on, often shortened to "TP." This can be dangerous

if the language lead people to suppose that, for

example, the purpose of "TP" is to induce people

to come to meetings, and if people express

involvement in other ways, they think "TP" is not

happening.

Richardson (1983:11-14) distinguishes

between "indirect" and "direct" participation.

Indirect participation includes activities like

voting for a representative. However, direct

participation attracts "the bulk of the interest

in participation in social policy" and refers to


page 100

"all those means by which consumer spokesmen (sic)

are brought into direct personal contact with

elected members or appointed officials for mutual

discussions" (14). Limitations imposed by time and

space mean these participants will often be

representatives of wider constituencies, appointed

or elected by individuals, groups or associations.

Writing on tenant participation in housing,

Birchall (1997:186-187) suggests that there are

"at least three types" of participation: taking

part in decisions at meetings and on committees;

taking direct action such as gardening and running

playgroups; and taking part in social events

including day trips, fund raising and so on. The

third type is usually an end in itself but the

first type is a means to an end - attending

meetings is, to most people, a cost to be borne

for the sake of getting a benefit. "It is

important to keep participation-as-means down to

manageable levels, because it is usually only

engaged in as long as tenants see a payoff" (187).


page 101

From the previous discussion, we see that

Cairncross et al (1994) include listening,

consultation, dialogue and joint management as

"participation." Control by tenants is "arguably"

not participation at all. The thought here is that

participation covers the ways in which tenants

influence controllers, but ceases when tenants are

themselves the controllers. Woods (1995) confines

"participation" to meetings where views are

expressed. Prior et al use the term much more

widely, consistent with their commitment to

"citizenship as participation."

A key difference here is that Cairncross

et al and Prior et al identify "participation" as

the activity of an organisation where its

representatives engage in meetings with decision

takers, while Richardson, Birchall and Woods

isolate the activity of the individual actors. The

latter approach has the advantage of permitting


page 102

analysis of the real pattern of power and

responsibility within and between organisations.

Birchall (1997:197) applies the insights of social

psychology to identify five types of response to

the opportunity to participate:

true believers are prepared to participate

freeloaders agree with the idea of

participation and want the benefits but are not

prepared to meet the costs in time and effort

sceptical conformers are doubtful that the

benefits will be realised but do not obstruct

the work

holdouts actively obstruct, perhaps by

spreading hostile rumours

escapees avoid any involvement and may even

withdraw from the setting where participation

occurs (such as moving house if a tenants'

organisation is formed)


page 103

True believers are always likely to be a

small minority compared with freeloaders, but if

there are sufficient true believers both to form a

committee and provide a pool of newcomers to

refresh committees, then an organisation is likely

to be able to take control successfully.

Sometimes, especially where there is a history of

antagonism to the authorities, sceptics become

participants and then convert other sceptics to

become freeloaders. In other cases the group of

true believers is so small that it cannot sustain

and replenish a committee (Birchall, 1997:198-

199).

Participation is costly. While Cairncross

et al report that "only" (sic) 29% of residents

have ever attended any sort of meeting of a

tenants association, many activists may be

spending over seven hours per week sustaining it

(Holmes 1992, quoted in Wishart and Furbey, 1997).

This raises the question of what rewards the


page 104

activist. One answer may be payment: where

organisations have budgets, activists become

employees. But research by Vakili-Zad (1993) into

tenant managed housing in Canada shows that this

undermines the democracy of the organisation that

first elects, then employs, activists. Another way

may be gaining qualifications with some currency

in labour markets (Wishart and Furbey, 1997).

Arguably, however, the fact that a small minority

bears costs to gain benefits that are distributed

equally across a larger group whom they represent,

takes us to the heart of what we mean by

"citizenship." For Hill (1994:25), the "key

elements" in

participative democracy are powersharing through decentraliseddecision-making and a pluralism ofassociation in which people canbecome actively involved. As aresult of these activities,citizenship as the acknowledgementof the public alongside the privategood is fostered.


page 105

In some situations (such as a design

meeting on individual homes, or perhaps a

"planning for real" session) participants are

negotiating on their own behalf: they are trading

off a cost against a direct benefit. As Birchall

argues, the majority of users will inevitably act

in this way: it is the rational way for economic

man or woman to behave. However it is much more

common that participants are the "true believers"

procuring a benefit for the larger group of

freeloaders and sceptics as well as for

themselves. As Woods shows, this extends to active

steps to represent, inform and encourage this

larger group.

There is a certain paradox here. The

republican model of citizenship sees the ideal

situation as one where all affected by a decision

participate in making it. The costs are borne more

or less equally by the beneficiaries. This cost-

bearing and cost-sharing process builds the common


page 106

democratic experience. But in the real world,

costs are borne by the "believing" minority who

express citizenship values in their readiness to

bear costs on behalf of the wider community, and

promote citizenship in representing and informing

their freeloading and sceptical neighbours. So

both citizenship principles - the rights based and

the participative - are at work.

We can analyse this through a hypothetical

but typical example. Let us say a neighbourhood of

100 households is planning a play area. In theory

such a facility could be provided as a private

good, but the transaction costs of erecting a

fence and a turnstile are such that it is more

sensible to develop a public good. If provided as

a private good, then the entrepreneur would buy

land and (in a perfect market) compensate

neighbours for disruption (noise, vandalism) and

pay the maintenance costs, etc. But in reality the

community as whole must resolve where the play


page 107

area is to go, persuade neighbours to accept

"external" costs and do maintenance on a self help

basis. In the republican ideal world all these

would be resolved at meetings where everyone

participates and everyone's costs and benefits are

taken into account. But in reality a small

minority participates in the detailed decisions, a

minority participates in building and cleaning the

play facility, and this minority carries the load

of persuading neighbours to accept external costs.

Maybe a majority participates in a "planning for

real" day (using models and games to design the

area) and a larger minority joins a day trip to

visit a play area elsewhere. The true believers

grumble about the freeloaders and will sometimes

blame them for not participating if their views

are under-represented. The freeloaders know that

if the number of participants falls too low the

play area will fail and accordingly take action

occasionally to encourage the true believers.

Among true believers are some whose own children


page 108

will use the play area, but so there are also

among freeloaders and perhaps sceptics. Likewise

there are non-users in all groups. Some true

believers may start out thinking that everyone

should take part and if they don't take part their

views don't deserve respect, but later realise

that they will convert few freeloaders.

Freeloaders and sceptics will be involved through

newsletters, surveys, exhibitions and so on, with

encouragement to convert to true believing

behaviour. Among participants, those who continue

to expect all beneficiaries to share participation

costs equally will soon drop out and either become

freeloaders themselves, or become sceptics or

holdouts ("It won't work; there's too much

apathy"): bitterness may even make them escape

altogether. The true believing minority are

motivated partly by a strong desire among some to

bring the facility into use, but also by a sense

that what they are doing will be "good for

everyone" combined with a recognition that only a


page 109

minority will bear the costs. In short, they

become "citizens;" or rather, they acquire the

skills and understanding that make a deepening of

citizenship possible (another way of putting the

same thought is that they become "active

citizens.") They may also become landscape

gardeners, book keepers and community workers,

perhaps to a professional standard. In this

process, they may be encouraged, trained and

guided by community workers who represent the

wider polity which in Walzer's analysis "frames

civil society." On this basis the state must "fix

the boundary conditions and the basic rules of all

associational activity," compel associations "to

consider the common good," and deal with the fact

that "civil society, left to itself, generates

radically unequal power relationships" (Walzer,

1992:103-4).

If, as is likely, the local authority

funds the play area, it will probably see the


page 110

project as developed and managed by

"participation." This is problematic if the

republican model is in the mind of officers and

councillors, since they will find that perhaps

only two or three people are actually

"participating" in such matters as briefing a

contractor, agreeing a budget or attending

training on health and safety. If they have in

mind a notion of "empowerment" then they may see

meetings with the participants as "empowering" and

draw the inference that their policy is

"empowering" a very small group rather than the

whole community. But (using Giddens' idea of

power) if the community is getting a facility

which, generally, it wants, which it would not

otherwise have, and if actions are being taken in

a way responsive to their wishes, then it has

gained power. Furthermore we may find that local

people place a different meaning on the play area

than they would had they not been empowered: such

as "this is something we worked for; we realise


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there will be problems but we will resolve those."

Using a notion closer to Clegg's framework of

agency, enrolment and circuits, we may suggest

that the local authority empowers an association

of users (whether that association is formally

constructed or not) to develop and manage a

facility in a way that moves some responsibility

to local people and increases the power of the

authority to deliver the benefit.

Only a small group will provide the

resource of leadership and effort to make this

empowerment effective. This group is empowered,

not by the Authority, but by the constituency to

which they are accountable. In turn the

participants empower the wider community by their

continual activity of informing, representing and

so on as set out in Woods' model. To express this

in Clegg's terms, the local authority enrols the

neighbourhood association (which it may first have


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to form). The association's relationship with the

participants is one of mutual enrolment.

Empowerment and consumption

The defining activity of the consumer is

choice. It is a task which modern society values

as a skill. "In a world full of choices," asks the

leaflet from the credit card company, "how can you

shop like an expert?" (and with post modern guile,

the leaflet does not mention credit cards; already

the shopper is known to have been educated to

think of "Goldfish" as a credit card.)

The literature on citizenship is rich in

reference to the idea of the consumer, to choice,

to the service user as "customer", with a range of

positions on whether this construction of the user

is compatible with citizenship. The aim of this

section is to offer clarity about "market


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consumer" and "customer" roles and how these can

be "empowering."

The theory of the competitive market

requires free access for any potential supplier to

the opportunity to provide goods or services to

possible buyers. Prices give a signal about what

buyers want. Suppliers can compete not just on the

basis of price ("I can offer product A more

cheaply than competitors") but also quality ("my

version of A is better than others") and product

innovation ("you've never seen product B, but it's

more useful/enjoyable/interesting than A"). The

idea of the market appeals not only to the right.

The editors of a book entitled "Market socialism"

suggest that markets

when they work well (are) anexcellent way of processinginformation, while simultaneouslyproviding incentives to act upon it... markets tend to encourageinnovation both in productiontechniques and in the goods


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themselves. (Estrin and le Grand,1989:3)

The competitive market empowers the

consumer, but not by requiring her to issue

directions to providers. The market consumer only

needs to choose between goods and services on

offer. The market does the rest - the process of

competition forces producers, not just to provide

what the consumer wants at the best price, but

even to think of new things the consumer doesn't

know she wants until they appear.

We have seen that "public goods" cannot by

definition be supplied by the market, unless

innovation reduces transaction costs making a

transition from public to private goods possible

(as may occur with road pricing when sensors

measure private road use). But "welfare" goods and

services could be provided by the market and in

some cases are. In general they are supplied

outside the market mechanism since markets


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discriminate according to how much money users

have, and society chooses to allocate such

services as education and health on a different

principle. These examples are provided (more or

less) free. Where housing is provided as a social

service, tenants pay a rent, but access to housing

is based on an assessment of need, so it is still

allocated on non-market criteria. There are other

problems with using the market to create the

supply of welfare goods and services. It is less

practical to operate a fully competitive market

for health and education than for some other

products. Consumers may be poorly placed to decide

whether an innovation is a good idea. Of course

serious advocates of market economics can think of

many solutions to these problems, such as vouchers

to buy goods and services and advocates to help

with choice, but on the whole, progress in

implementing these ideas has been slow or non-

existent since the 1980s.


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Even though the fully formed "free market"

model may not be applicable, there are aspects of

consumer empowerment that have been applied. Keat

(1994) suggests that we

distinguish at least two primarythings that seem to be meant bythose who advocate the conferral ofthis status of consumer, whilstrecognising that there are manymore specific or versions ofinterpretations of each of these.

They are:1. That the production of suchgoods and services should beorganised in ways thatsignificantly mirror or parallelthose involved in a free marketeconomy, for example through theuse of mechanisms enablingcompetition between rivalproducers, of contractuallyspecified forms of exchange, and soon;2. That the consumers of thesegoods and services should enjoy thekind of relationship with theirproducers that may be thought toobtain between actual consumers andproducers in a free market economy,and hence, for example, that thesegoods and services should satisfytheir consumers' preferences, beresponsive to their demands, and soon depending on how thatrelationship is understood.


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However it has proved difficult in

practice for final users to set prices, choose

providers or set their own standards. If users do

this with money that is not their own, then there

is the danger of open-ended price increases as

welfare-assisted buyers chase up the market. These

buyers become privileged compared with competing

buyers who have to spend their own money. Marshall

pointed out that this would occur with legal aid

(1992:31). A similar effect has happened with

housing benefit. After the 1988 Housing Act, the

Conservative government freed rents from control

and allowed unemployed and low-income private

tenants to claim housing benefit on “market”

rents. Gradually the state has had to reimpose

controlled rents and specify the standard of

accommodation that housing benefit-assisted

tenants can rent from private landlords (see for

example DoE, 1995). The state therefore has to

stand between the user and the supplier: setting


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standards and prices, and offering contracts to

competing private firms (see for example Bartlett

and le Grand, 1993). Thus the

citizen is empowered as a consumerby being given specific rights: toreceive information on standards ofperformance of services, to haveindividual needs assessed, toassert choices and preferences, tocomplain and receive redress

while the

service providers are forced into amarket orientation by ...competition, contracting ofservices to the private sector,performance related pay, andgreater accountability (Prior etal, 1995:15)

This version of consumer oriented

citizenship is drawn very widely, embracing some

long standing practices (such as buying some

services from the private sector) and others that

have very little bearing on user choice (such as

performance related pay).


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For Hill (1994:25) participative

citizenship

cannot be nurtured by consumerchoice, by exercising the "exit"option of which Hirschman speaks,but by positive involvement notmerely to monitor standards but tohold public providers to account.

The reference is to the economist

Hirschman (1970) who analysed the "exit" and

"voice" options open to customers of private

firms. The market mechanism allows dissatisfied

customers to switch to a competitor; wise firms

offer customers a "voice" to express

dissatisfaction, which gives time to adjust to new

demands or remedy problems, and builds loyalty

among customers who identify with the firm's

strategy. In a later work, Hirschman (1985)

applied the lesson to the public sector, asking if

users persisted with the costly (and therefore, in

economic terms, non-rational) strategy of


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participation because they found satisfaction in

the activity. In referring to "exit" Hill is using

"Consumer choice" to refer specifically to what

Woods calls the "narrow definition" of consumer

empowerment - the power to sway suppliers by

exercising choice among competing providers. This

is, in Hill's view, categorically incompatible

with the development of participative and

pluralist citizenship in meeting social rights. A

public sector monopoly provider is the only

legitimate way to provide services in response to

these rights, with citizenship values promoted

within this structure by participation.

How do "exit or voice" apply to users of

welfare services? The model is applied by Foley

and Evans (1995) and Stewart and Taylor (1995) to

UK housing services. "Exit" applies to the

situation where service users can opt out of state

provision. Foley and Evans, and Stewart and

Taylor, suggest that, in UK housing services, the


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opportunity to form ownership or management co-

operatives, or to transfer to a different

landlord, are cases of "exit." Negotiated

"partnerships" where the local authority retains

influence on boards are cases of "voice." There is

a paradox here since the “exit” versions of co-

operative housing also require high levels of

participation and are often held up as advanced

examples of user control and participation

(Richardson 1983:22; Prior et al 1995:139). Furbey

et al (1996) follow Foley and Evans in seeing

tenant controlled housing as a contradictory case

where consumerist values (exit/choice) appear to

be conflated with participative notions of

citizenship.

Discussion of consumerism and citizenship

therefore leaves knotty problems. Consumer

empowerment revolves around choice of provider,

but the citizen-as-consumer is usually denied that

choice. Consumerism and participation are usually


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considered opposed versions of citizenship, but

the most participative experiment (co-op housing)

is also the one that appears to offer the most

radical form of consumer choice. Can we unravel

these knots?

By way of a preliminary distinction, we

should observe that some writers (for example

Hugman, 1994:209) follow Woods in distinguishing

between "market consumerism" and "democratic

consumerism." Market consumerism is empowerment

through choice; democratic consumerism is

empowerment through user control over or

participation in the process of product

specification. The market mechanism is not at work

in the second case and the economic concept of

"consumer sovereignty" is not applicable.

We can then note a distinction between

customers and consumers. As Clarke (1994; for more


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detail see also Lusk, 1997) notes, businesses can

naturally talk of "our customer" but not "our

consumers." Consumers are "out there" to be won in

the market, and when captured become "customers"

whose choices are a concern to the firm. Where

service users have no choice of supplier or

standards, but do have certain rights such as

complaints procedures and redress, it is better to

depict them as "customers" rather than

"consumers."

We can finally note that there is no

reason why market consumer empowerment should be

confined to individual transactions at the final

point of consumption. In housing, tenant

participation can extend to the choice of

competing architects. Tenant-controlled housing

groups have budgets which they use to purchase

repairs services from competing contractors. From

the point of view of the council housing repairs

direct service, this is "exit". But tenants may


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wish to continue with other council services (such

as seconded housing managers) and to remain secure

tenants of the council, even while "exiting" from

other parts of the service. Tenants' groups may

alternatively "exit" from council ownership but

continue to be under a substantial degree of

council control (as is the case with "local

housing companies").

A user group may be collectively empowered

but nonetheless it has duties to individual

customers. Thus in a tenant controlled housing

organisation, individual tenants need to be

protected with service standards, complaints

procedures and so on, and to be consulted about

the organisation's business, as well as having the

opportunity to "participate" in decisions and

activities. Individuals may also be empowered as

consumers - for instance with choices over home

improvements including paid-for "tenant extras."


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Coming within the general ambit of the

"consumerism" debate are a number of ways for

groups and individuals to be empowered. Market

consumerism may enable groups to select providers

from a competing pool, and to encourage competing

providers to adapt service to demand. Market

consumerism and democratic consumerism are not

mutually exclusive: for example, a user group may

use the market to procure a provider (such as an

architect or repairs contractor) and democratic

consumerism to develop the required product or

service.

Individuals without a choice of provider

or service specification may be "customers" having

rights to be treated in certain ways with redress

in the event of failure. Customers are empowered

where these cause agents to follow standards that

customers are aware of, and may influence.

Customers may be consulted and their wants

researched, and these are also empowering if


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research findings are implemented and monitored.

Control, participation, consultation and customer

empowerment are not alternative models for user

groups, since groups with delegated control and

participation still need customer policies and

procedures.

Implemented in the right way, these are

all tools for empowerment which achieve results in

different ways. Their value will vary according to

the aspirations of groups and the nature of

transactions being undertaken. It follows that it

is not empowering to develop holistic models of

user groups according to preconceived typologies

that then inhibit or deny the application of some

tools. To prohibit "market consumerism" on the

basis that it is not compatible with "citizenship"

is just as "disempowering" as discouraging

"participation" on the basis that it is the wrong

kind of "choice."


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Conclusion to chapter 3

This chapter has outlined an approach to

"empowerment" based on the work of Giddens and

Clegg. It has considered alternative models of

user involvement in welfare services and analysed

the meaning and empowering content of

"participation" and "consumption" in the light of

their deployment in these models and in practical

action. It has proposed a focus on the actions of

individuals set in organisations with

representative and empowering circuits within

their structures and in relation to other

agencies. In the main the concepts described under

the general headings of participation and

consumption represent potentially empowering tools

deployed together in a complementary fashion.

Applying these concepts to classify types of

organisation against models of citizenship may

therefore be unhelpful and disempowering.

Participative citizenship emerges as a cost borne

disproportionately by those prepared to carry a


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representative role. Wholesale participation is

not a real occurrence and is not be equated with

citizenship.


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Chapter 4

Introduction to the co-operative housing

case study

Developing a hypothesis

This thesis has considered the position of

users of social welfare services. These are goods

and services that society chooses to allocate to

users outside the market mechanism. We have seen

that this discussion relates to private goods and

services, meaning goods and services which

technically can be provided by private enterprise

through the market. Education, health, social and

environmental services and some housing are among

the private goods and services allocated in this

way in the UK. Users of these services receive

them on the basis of their social rights. In the

1990s there has been a revival in interest in

“citizenship” and in the idea of social rights as

one kind of citizenship rights. This “citizenship

revival” includes a strong interest in the


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empowerment of service users. I have argued that

we can understand this as a contemporary

development of the rights of the “social citizen”

rather than an obligation on citizens to

participate. The idea of a duty to participate is

not consistent with the pluralistic and liberal

values that underpin the citizenship revival, and

in general participation is a minority activity.

Much of the literature on this question assumes

that empowering the service user as a participant

is an alternative to empowering the user as a

consumer. On this analysis, there are on the one

hand “commercial” models of user rights,

constructing the user as a consumer or customer

with rights to choice and to a defined standard of

service; and on the other hand, “participative”

rights (or, alternatively, duties) where users

take an active part in developing and managing a

service which can be fitted to their needs. The

former model is sometimes depicted as compatible

with using private sector suppliers focusing


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services on individuals, and the latter with the

retention of a public service monopoly and the

formation of collective organisations among users.

By examining the language and the models used, and

the evidence in some of the literature, I have

argued that this depiction is misconceived. The

roles of consumer (with choice of supplier),

customer (with rights to a standard of service)

and participant (taking an active part in the

controlling body) refer to the conceptually

distinct activities of individuals and groups in

different operations all of which al like to come

within the scope of “empowered” agency. Groups

may be “consumers” (exercising collective choice

over service providers). “Participation” will

often refer to the actions of individuals within

groups, empowered to act on behalf of less active

members. Collective empowerment may be most likely

to arise from being able to combine these roles

deploying whichever type of power is most

appropriate from one situation to another.


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Classifying groups according to preconceptions

based on “citizen or consumer?” models may be

dispempowering.

This discussion suggest two possible

hypotheses. Put weakly, the argument may lead us

to claim that a combination of “participation” and

“consumer” empowerment is possible, in other words

that the two versions of citizen empowerment are

not mutually exclusive, as some of the literature

suggests. Put more strongly, the argument would be

that a combination of these roles, or policy

orientations, is necessary if user empowerment, and

the benefits that are believed to flow from it,

are to be achieved. The weaker version of the

hypothesis could, logically, be proved from one

case, since one case would disprove the negative.

The stronger version would need a number of cases

to “prove” or, more accurately, to test to a point

where a reasonable degree of confidence is

established.


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Choice of methodology for testing the hypothesis

What kind of research method would test

the hypothesis? The hypothesis is about

“empowerment.” “Power” is the “capability of an

actor to intervene in a series of events so as to

alter their course” (Giddens 1976:111). This

implies a process of change where we can discern a

course of events, and at least the possibility of

a different course that would have occurred in the

absence of a particular actor’s capability. There

is a further process of change involved in

“empowerment,” which suggests a process during

which people move from having less to having more

power. As we saw in the previous chapter, the

analysis of “power” is not easy: no one is

powerlessness and any process of “empowerment”

implies a sharing of power and enrolment in the

agency of others. Nonetheless the basic point

holds that both a change in the course of events,

and a change in the ability of the service user to


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effect that change, are implied in the presence of

“empowerment.” To study the factors that

contribute to empowerment, we need to observe

processes of change.

We have seen that users may effect change

by a variety of mechanisms including participation

in decisions, consumer choice among competing

suppliers and propositions, and “customer”

empowerment through the use of service standards

and research into customer wants. As we saw in the

last chapter, one of the claims of “market”

structures with supplier competition is that it

promotes innovation. Innovation may also come from

other mechanisms, but consumer choice should

empower users by speeding up the origination and

delivery of innovations which deliver benefits

that satisfy users. Processes of change that

include innovations (such as new ways of providing

services or of involving users) are of particular

interest. We also saw that some research suggests


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that government organisations prescribe acceptable

forms of empowerment and prohibit others,

reflecting different political orientations. So

the role of the relevant level of government in

restricting or expanding the range of choices of

methods of empowerment is also of interest. If it

is true both that government organisations are

predisposed towards certain types of user power,

and empowered users benefit from a choice of all

available methods, then there is some likelihood

of conflict between empowered service users and

government organisations - although empowerment

does not necessarily entail or imply conflict

(Giddens 1976:112).

A process of change over time could be

studied by a number of alternative methods:

surveys, historical studies, observation and

experiment all offer possibilities. Experiment

enables the researcher to control variables and

test the effects of particular factors that can be


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isolated; the usually stated disadvantage is that

the events researched occur artificially

(Hammersley 1992:192). The use of experimental

methods could be particularly appropriate to

examine customer choice, service standards and

perhaps participatory techniques, where the

researcher is testing methods that could be

replicated by managers or change-initiators

seeking to apply methods of empowerment.

Experimental methods are likely to be of little

value in examining the role of political agencies

in facilitating or preventing empowerment, since

there would be too many variables to be controlled

and the researchers themselves would become

objects of political interest and could be forced

to modify research methods and programmes

accordingly. Surveys have the advantage of being

able to capture data from a wide range of

different situations and make precise comparisons

between specific types of data. Time-separated

surveys of the same group could be applied to


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study change. Surveys however require a precise

definition at the outset of the fields of interest

to the researcher, in other words a well developed

theoretical framework. Two of the three models

considered in chapter 3 (those of Cairncross et al

and Woods) used surveys to test their hypotheses,

but both relied on typologies of consumption and

citizenship that were, I suggested, questionable.

Once a survey is underway it is difficult to

review the theoretical frame without compromising

the integrity of the research.

Observation has the advantage of

flexibility: “a continual process of reflection

and alteration of the focus of observations in

accordance with theoretical developments” is

possible (May 1993:120). Observation of a

particular case brings the benefit of greater

detail and the ability to refine the focus to the

specific instance, but the disadvantage of less

capacity to generalise to finite populations


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(Hammersley 1992:196). Most observation presents

the problem of how researchers present themselves.

While much literature stresses the particular

nature of “participant” as against non-participant

observation, Goode and Hatt (1981:123) point out

that even “nonparticipant observation” is usually

“quasi-participant” observation. To be able to

“see” events in any worthwhile detail means

getting close enough to subjects for them to be

aware of the researcher’s presence, and to react

to it. Observers may disguise themselves in such a

way as to be an unobtrusive presence, but this

requires skill and perhaps some deception. The

observer may be open about a research purpose, but

this inevitably brings into play the “knowingness”

of subjects who are likely to adjust their

behaviour for the “camera” of research.

Participant observation, where the researcher is

carrying out some specific and appropriate task,

has the benefit of providing a rational way of

“normalising” the researcher’s presence. As a


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participant, the observer becomes immersed in the

daily activity of the group and should acquire the

“going on knowledge” that the social researcher

requires. “In the process” participant observers

“witness the ‘reflexive rationalisation’ of

conduct, that is the continual interpretation and

application of new knowledge by people (including

themselves) in their social environment as an

ongoing process” (May 1993:116). The participant

observer must deal with the problems of

maintaining objectivity (perhaps by making regular

notes to be checked by an outside uninvolved

party) and reviewing the researcher’s own

interactions with and effects upon the group or

operation being studied. Where there is a process

of change which may provoke political controversy,

participant observation carries the problem that

parties may adjust their behaviour in response to

the presence of the observer and that the

observer’s own views and prejudices may directly

affect the processes under review. At best, this


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makes it difficult for research to be usefully

replicated for findings to be tested.

A historical study is an appropriate way

to consider change over time (Giddens, 1997:547).

It offers the flexibility found with observation

and the further advantage that the events that

occur cannot change in response to the

researcher’s presence. It retains the

particularity of the observed case and thus the

difficulty in generalising from the case. If we

are interested in events that cannot be controlled

or predicted - such as innovation and political

controversy - then historical cases may offer a

more fruitful field than the observation of “live”

cases. Any case study approach carries the problem

that the researcher may become too close to the

material, too easily convinced by the “feel” of

events, to look critically at findings. The

research should as far as possible use sources and

methods that other researchers can replicate in


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order to test the findings in relation to the

particular case. The research should seek to

classify its material so that the research “codes”

can be applied in other studies applying to

different cases to see if the results can be

replicated (Goode and Hatt 1981:336-7).

The empirical study: a historical case study of

co-operative housing

The empirical focus in this thesis is on

housing. As we have seen, housing is a field where

user empowerment has produced models of user

control more fully developed than in other areas

of welfare provision (Richardson 1983:22; Prior et

al, 1995:139). This is related to the fact that

housing produced arguably the most striking

examples of the damaging effects of user

disempowerment observed from the late 1960s

onwards (for example Dennis, 1970; Dennis, 1972;

Davies, 1972). The Labour Government of 1974-79

gave powers to local authorities to delegate


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housing management to user co-operatives and

encouraged the development of co-operatives to own

housing developed by subsidised housing

associations. The 1979-97 Conservative governments

encouraged tenant management of council housing

from the late 1980s and implemented a tenant right

to manage from 1993. The Labour government elected

in 1997 has increased funding for the support of

tenant participation and announced a new Tenant

Empowerment Grant. User controlled organisations

that manage or own publicly-assisted housing can

use budgets to employ staff directly or to buy in

contractors for repairs, design, housing

management and so on; in many cases they also have

choices to use council services. The range of

“market” options open to tenant controlled housing

management organisations is thus much more wide

ranging than those usually open, for example, to

school governors. Housing offers a rich field for

the examination of the effects of different models

of user empowerment.


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The particular empirical study in this

thesis is a historical case study of co-operative

housing, particularly focusing on the development

of new building by user co-operatives. The

background to the case includes the origins and

development of co-ownership housing, as a private

sector, provider-dominated service in the UK in

the 1960s. The case itself includes formation of a

local service “market” for co-operatives in

Liverpool following the 1974 Housing Act, and the

rapid growth of user-controlled co-operatives in

the city with high levels of user participation

and control combined with a competitive market in

service provision. This was followed by a strong

political reaction against the co-operatives after

a change in the elected local council in 1983.

This in turn had consequences for the formation of

national political thinking towards user

involvement in public housing. This study thus

offers a case rich in the events that may be


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involved in user empowerment, change and

innovation: the presence of both consumer choice

of suppliers and user participation; clearly

discernible change in the nature of service

provision consequent on growth in user power;

formation of user agencies with control over

services; political conflict revealing sharply

different political models on user empowerment.

Data sources and commentary on “practitioner

observation”

The methods for collecting the data in the

study include my own observations as a participant

in some of the events; documentary research; and

interviews with participants. I worked from 1977

as a co-operative development officer with one of

the housing associations (CDS Liverpool) described

in the study. My role was to give advice and

training to some of the co-operatives. I was also

part of the team that made strategic

recommendations to the management of CDS

Liverpool. At the time I joined CDS it was a new

organisation that had just broken away from its

national parent; it had parted company from this


page 145

organisation and another local associate and the

nucleus of its staff had formed a clear view of

the weaknesses of these organisations, drawing on

academic research as well as their experience. In

particular there was a strong antipathy within the

new CDS to “vested interest,” where the roles of

tenant leader, political agent, paid service

agency and architect, overlapped with each other

creating a tight circle of client-contractor

relations. Clear separation of user and provider

roles, transparency in these relations, and user

choice between competing providers were seen as

values to be defended for professional and

personal integrity. Hence I am strongly aware of

the “reflexive rationalisations” of conduct which

helped to shape and govern the then very unusual

pattern of competing service agencies for user

controlled housing that developed in Liverpool as

a result of the interaction of national and local

forces described in the study that follows.

Competition between service agents as a tool for

promoting and supporting user control of public

housing has since been adopted by national

Government, which recognises and approves agencies

to receive funding under section 16 of the 1986

Housing and Planning Act to provide advice to

tenant organisations contemplating tenant control

and other “empowerment” options. These agencies


page 146

are selected by tenant groups, usually on the

basis of competitive proposals from agencies.

Since leaving CDS in 1988 I have worked as a self-

employed consultant specialising in tenant

control, working in this national service market.

This means that I have the “going on knowledge” of

the field of study that comes with a long career

as a service agent for user controlled housing

groups. This knowledge has been gained as a

practitioner, and, as previously observed, the

strongest research into the operation of welfare

services is likely to benefit from the

practitioner perspective, simply because the

practitioner develops and tests a robust

understanding of the “going on knowledge” required

to enter into social relations in the field of

study. Giddens (1982a:13) argues that the

researcher must possess this “going on knowledge.”

This means that the observer must accurately

understand “the concepts by which actors’ conduct

is oriented.” It does not mean the reverse - that

research concepts must be understandable to the

actors themselves in analysing and determining

their own conduct. It is essential that

researchers understand enough about what

practitioners do to be able, at least in

principle, to enter the social field themselves -

so in practice research in an area like user


page 147

controlled welfare services will benefit from a

practitioner perspective. But good research is not

necessarily of any direct use to practitioners.

Hammersley (1992:152) makes this point in

concluding that, “while there are forms of enquiry

that are closely related to practical

activities ... research is the activity of a

research community oriented to discovering errors

and producing knowledge of general, rather than

specific, relevance to practice.” As a

practitioner in the field of user control, I am

conscious of the reflexive linkages made between

theorised experience and the development of

practical models. As a researcher, I am primarily

interested in contributing to a more generally

applicable theorised understanding of the field in

which I work. I am also conscious of the need for

a theoretical perspective that can transcend the

“boundedness” of the political imagination that

continues to set limits on users’ scope for

innovation.

I also occupied a particular position in

the field of social relations described in the

study that follows. The issue of co-operative

housing became a hotly contested one - by the city


page 148

Labour Party’s own assessment, the most

controversial issue dealt with by a highly

controversial council. At the time I was not

planning to use the material I gained for

research, and did not subject myself to the kind

of controls that a “participant observer” should

follow. The scale of the local political

hostility, the national attention the co-

operatives attracted and the subsequent impact on

policy indicated that the events were of some

historical significance. There was no easy

explanation for the local Labour Party’s

determination, at the time, to destroy the co-

operative housing movement. It was in trying to

get to grips with this question that I came to

appreciate the significance of citizenship and

social rights.

In preparing the case study I have been

conscious of the need to use material that is

available to other researchers and to make my


page 149

interpretation of events as transparent as

possible. I have made use of press reports,

council minutes, and internal council and Labour

party documents which are quoted in my research. I

have also made use of published research and of

books produced by some of the politicians

involved. Interviews were conducted with several

workers from each of the agencies involved in the

creation of the local service market. However

there is certainly scope for subsequent research

to develop empirical material on the housing co-

operative movement in Liverpool and the politics

of housing in the city. My main objective has been

to develop an understanding of the relationship

between user choice, collective user empowerment

and the limits imposed by the political process.

In this process I have worked on the conceptual

model of user empowerment that has been developed

in the previous discussion in this thesis. The one

case study here may “prove” the weaker version of

the hypothesis with which this chapter began: that


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user empowerment is possible through a combination

of “consumer” and “participative” roles. The wider

hypothesis, that empowerment tends to require this

combination, needs further testing. This could be

through surveys, comparative case studies,

participant observation and experiment. The

approach could be applied to other welfare fields

apart from housing.

In the conclusion (chapter 6) there are

further observations on possible research

methodologies and research foci for empirical

analysis of social citizen empowerment, taking

account of recent international work.

Co-operative housing: scope and British background

There is no established definition of a

“Co-operative.” The scope of the term is usually

settled by reference to principles revised

periodically by the International Co-operative

Alliance. The most recent revision, in 1995,


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defined a co-operative as “an autonomous

association of persons united voluntarily to meet

their common economic, social and cultural needs

through a jointly-owned and democratically

controlled enterprise.” There are seven

“principles” which are “guidelines by which co-

operatives put their values in to practice.” These

include voluntary, open and non-discriminatory

membership policies; democratic control on the

basis of one member, one vote; “members’ Economic

Participation” meaning that the capital is

controlled by the co-operative, and “at least part

of the capital is usually the common property of

the co-operative.” Return on capital to members is

limited. Dividends if any are distributed in

proportion to member participation in the activity

of the co-operative. Co-operatives are independent

and autonomous; they train their members and co-

operate with other co-operatives; and they have a

“concern for community: Co-operative work for the

sustainable development of their communities


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through polices approved by their members” (Co-

operative Principles quoted in Rodgers 1998:59).

The British co-operative movement can

trace its history to the last decades of the

eighteenth century (Cole, 1944). Accounts of the

early co-operatives often include the terminating

building societies. These self-build clubs - where

members’ savings were pooled, building homes one

by one until all were housed - built around 2,000

homes from 1775 to 1825 (Short, 1982:121). The

establishment of a British co-operative movement

is usually associated with Robert Owen and his

publication from 1813 of essays later titled "A

New View of Society," and then with the Rochdale

Pioneers who opened their co-operative store in

1844. For Owen, capitalism and religion were

forces that corrupted human nature. He proposed

that the state and the parishes promote "Villages

of Co-operation", self supporting commonwealths,

to employ the poor, but the project was


page 153

in Owen's mind much more than this.He conceived that if his idea weretaken up its success would be sostriking that all Great Britain,and indeed the entire world, wouldbe governed by "Villages of Co-operation," each self governing inits own affairs and making up, inassociation with other villages,such simple government as countriesand the world as a whole wouldneed. This was Owen's "New MoralWorld" based on the principles ofCo-operation and human fellowship.(Cole, 1944:19)

From 1820 until the mid eighteen thirties

Owen was among the leaders of a series of projects

around the themes of Socialism, Trade Unionism and

Co-operation. They included the formation of craft

unions, militant and parliamentary campaigns for

the reduction of factory hours, dozens of local

and national publications, the formation of around

250 co-operative societies formed between 1826 and

1835 - typically retail stores formed with a view

to promoting employment prior to establishing

"Villages" - and experiments in the creation of

Owenite "Co-operative Communities." The Owenite


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villages required start-up capital invested by

wealthy benefactors, and all failed in a short

time. The formation of co-operative stores and

similar self-sustaining local self help schemes

were of no interest to Owen, who was anxious that

they should not be confused with his "plan" for

"Co-operation;" they were of interest to true

Owenites only as means to raise capital quickly

for investment in Villages and the wider movement

(Cole 1944:68).

Owen faded out of organised working class

economic action ("which had never much interested

him except ... as instruments for the instant

realisation of his millennial hopes") but Owenism

persisted as a "rational religion" promoted by

local evangelists focusing on education and

conversion to the co-operative "gospel" under the

auspices of the Universal Community Society of

Rational Religionists (Cole 1944 :18-33).


page 155

By 1844, when the Rochdale Pioneers

established the Toad Lane store that is

acknowledged as the foundation of British co-

operation, Owenism was well known under the

interchangeable names "Co-operation" or

"Socialism" as a "plan" for a "New Moral Order"

(Cole 1944:13). Rochdale was a northern weaving

centre, a leading town for working class agitation

and unrest, where Owenite socialists debated with

the Chartists and the Corn Law League over the

merits of alternative reform programmes. A large

group of the Pioneers were Owenites disillusioned

with the internal disputes of the movement, much

of it over whether the Rational Society's

missionaries should establish legally recognised

churches (Cole 1944:58-60). The Rochdale society

was Owenite in aspiration, its fifth object being

That as soon as practicable, thissociety shall proceed to arrangethe powers of production,distribution, education andgovernment, in other words toestablish a self-supporting homecolony of united interests ...


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The Rochdale constitution included eight

principles: democratic control, open membership,

fixed interest on capital, dividend on purchases,

cash trading, supply of pure and unadulterated

products, education and political and religious

neutrality (Cole 1944:74).

The Rochdale Pioneers included housing in

its aims and built two small developments. From

1845 to 1851 the Chartist Co-operative Land

Society attracted 60,000 subscribing members and

built 250 owner-occupied homes on six estates

(Towers, 1995:6-7). In total the nineteenth

century co-operative movement lent mortgages to

members on nearly 24,000 homes, built over 8,000

homes for renting to members, and over 5,000 for

sale to members (Birchall, 1988:93). From 1887

until the first world war, the Co-partnership

movement developed local societies as co-

operatives in which tenants bought shares on


page 157

instalments and other capital came from outside

investors and public low-interest loans. The Co-

partnerships built at least 8,600 homes (Birchall,

1991) and were particularly associated with garden

cities development. A legal framework for “public

utility societies” was developed early in the

twentieth century to cater for the non-profit

welfare sector including housing associations and

co-operatives. Before the first war there was

widespread expectation that co-partnerships,

rather than councils, would become the major

provider in the emerging “social” housing sector.

However, the Co-operative and trade union

movements became deeply suspicious of the attempts

by the national promoters of co-partnership to

maintain central control of local societies,

including a central monopoly of building supplies,

and threw its weight behind council housing and

owner occupation as the two main sources of new

housing development after the first world war. Co-

operative housing then attracted very little


page 158

interest until the co-ownership experiments in the

1960s were followed by a co-operative revival

especially in inner city redevelopment in the

1970s. The main thrust of co-operative housing

promotion since the late 1980s has been on the

management of council estates, especially more

difficult estates, and the co-operative tradition

is now seen as having a contribution to make in

the empowerment of welfare housing users and

overcoming the perceived problems of “social

exclusion.”

The usual approach in Britain since the

second world war has been to define co-operatives

as societies which own or manage homes which are

rented or leased to members; and self-build groups

which come together to build homes which are

bought by members on completion. In the 1960s the

co-operative sector included ownership

organisations paying a premium to members based on

the growth in rental value of their homes, using


page 159

Scandinavian models, but returns failed to compete

with growth achieved by owner occupiers and the

model was abandoned. In Britain at present the co-

operatives which own homes are nearly always “par

value” where members’ equity does not increase

with the value of the property, and is usually

only a small token sum. Members renting from “par

value” co-operatives are eligible for the housing

benefit which meets rent for people with no or

little income - a benefit which is not available

to owner occupiers.

Literature on co-operative housing:

communitarianism and user control

Research into co-operatives often begins

with a proclamation of the classic ideals such as

enunciated by Fauget:

The primary aim of the co-operativeinstitution is to improve theeconomic position of its members,but ... it aims at ... a higher


page 160

goal: to make men with a sense ofboth individual and jointresponsibility, so that they mayrise to a full personal life andcollectively to a full social life(quoted in Andrews & Breslauer,1976:13)

leading to an expression of idealistic

faith in co-operatives as expressed by Hands:

Housing co-operatives couldtransform the basis of housingorganisation and management in thiscountry. Ultimately, in concertwith house-building co-operativesand other workers' co-operatives,they have the potential oftranscending the values ofcentralised control and self-interest which divide society,giving back to people a greatercontrol over their own lives anddestiny. But the power achievedthrough co-operation is not aselfish one: it derives from amutual aid which recognises theinterdependence of each sector ofour community on every othersector. (Hands, 1975:136)

Birchall (1988) suggests that Co-operation

may have its roots in the view of "human nature"

which he calls communitarianism - the belief that


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people best meet their wants by collective but

voluntary procurement - as against two

alternatives, individualism and collectivism. The

“communitarians” take a lead from the anarchists -

Kropotkin and Proudhon - and from Martin Buber,

and vest in housing co-ops the hope that they may

turn out to be the

"cell-tissue" of a new society,growing within the old ... Theypreserve the community forms whichremain within a society threatenedwith atomism between the twinforces of state and capital, andthey fill them with a new spirit.(Birchall, 1988, p.57).

To fulfil these aims housing co-ops must

work with other types of co-operative (industrial,

agrarian etc.) on the project of a new type of

polity, achieved through wider federation.

However, housing co-operatives in practice do not

fulfil such "grand, some might say grandiose

theory" but correspond rather to a pluralistic

social model in which a sense of mutual


page 162

responsibility is expressed in voluntary

association (58).

Clapham and Kintrea (1992:171-3)

acknowledge the anarchist and communitarian roots

of the co-operative tradition, but question

whether British co-operative housing actually

exemplifies this model or whether housing tenure

itself has any bearing on wider social and

political attitudes. Rather co-ops support the

same conclusions as studies of owner occupation:

Co-operatives allow residentssubstantial control over theirhousing situation, and it is thiscontrol that lies at the heart ofthe material and social benefits tobe derived from co-operativehousing (173).

The emphasis on control comes through in

the work of Colin Ward (1990), who identifies

himself as an anarchist working in the tradition

of Proudhon and Kropotkin and who stresses

particularly the negative consequences of state


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control in planning, producing and managing

housing. Another advocate of co-operative housing,

John F. C. Turner, saw state domination of the

planning and provision of housing for the less

prosperous as failing. Dweller control is

necessary to meet wants:

While hierarchically organized orauthoritarian corporations andbureaucracies cannot respond to thetrue heterogeneity of low-incomehousing demands, a network ofdiscrete services can. This networkneeds and uses both institutionsand standards, but innonauthoritarian ways. Byseparating the legislative functionof rule making ... from the freeuse of those rules and services ...it is entirely possible to ensurethat things made, and the ways inwhich they are made, are of valueto their users. (Turner, 1972:174-5)

Writers on the co-operative experience in

Britain from the 1970s stressed co-operative

control as an alternative to councils that were

“insufferably paternalistic” and bound by absurd

rules which meant that, for example, the Greater


page 164

London Council built high-rise flats without sink

traps resulting in frequent drainage overflows

into lower stories, because earlier public health

officers controlling the development of cottage

housing had banned sink traps as a health hazard

(Judge, 1981:51-52).

Co-operative housing may thus be studied

as the outworking of “communitarian” theory of

the kind expressed by Owen or Fauget, or as a

means of empowering users to exercise control over

the development and management of a shared housing

environment. The term “communitarian” carries

different meanings which we need to clarify before

concluding this point. First, “communitarianism”

is sometimes set against “individualism” as a

methodology, and the question here is whether

human consciousness and human agency are to be

analysed as a property of relationships or whether

the human will is, in the final analysis,

autonomous; this is a complex argument where the


page 165

distinction becomes very difficult to pin down

precisely (Mulhall and Swift: 1992). Second,

“communitarianism” is often set against

“individualism” as a governing social principle,

where the question is whether social organisation

and control should be minimised to ensure maximum

personal liberty, or whether greater control on

individual rights are necessary to protect wider

freedoms to pursue common goals. It is in this

second sense that, for example, Etzioni (1995)

calls himself a “communitarian:” he argues that

excessive individualism means that people have

lost sight of collective responsibilities, because

a powerful state has relieved individuals of the

costs of their decisions and choices. The

“communitarianism” of the early Co-operators made

much stronger claims than either of these

positions. Owen and Fauget advocated communal

decisions on a wide range of economic and social

matters, resulting in a transition to a new human

being. This version of “community” is not shared


page 166

by modern housing co-operatives. Co-operators are

seeking greater control over housing. Their

aspirations fit into a pluralistic view of civil

society and welfare provision, where self-help and

self-reliance are fostered in a setting that, on

Birchall’s construction, also promotes a willing

sharing of responsibility for neighbours and the

wider community. On this basis, co-operative

housing should be considered as an established

example of user control of service provision,

rather than as developing a distinctive type of

community.

Co-operative housing in Britain: development into

the 1970s

After the first world war, the British Co-

operative and Labour movements put their weight

behind council housing and owner occupation as the

main housing providers, with only a marginal role

for co-partnership. The co-operative movement made

a renewed attempt to interest government in co-op


page 167

housing after the second world war, but Aneurin

Bevan as health and housing minister in the post

war Labour government regarded co-operatives as

“not plannable” so not to be encouraged (Clapham,

1987). A small number of self-build societies and

rental projects were developed on co-operative

principles in the 1940s and 1950s. Two small co-

operatives were developed using council mortgages

in Willesden, London, under the auspices of a

local politician, Reg Freeson, who later became

housing minister in the 1974-79 Labour government.

His experiments impressed a Co-operative Party

politician, Harold Campbell. The alliance between

Freeson and Campbell became important in shaping

the politics of co-operative housing in the 1970s

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as

council leader in Willesden, west London, Reg

Freeson promoted three small co-operative housing

associations using powers under the 1957 and 1959


page 168

Housing Acts. Tenants bought a £1 share which did

not change in value: thus the term "par value" to

describe this type of ownership co-op. The rest of

the finance came from council loans. The first two

co-operatives enabled tenants of existing blocks

of flats to take over ownership from private

landlords, to achieve repairs and restrict rent

rises. The third one supported the conversion of

one house into six flats. Freeson was a Co-

operative Party member and later a Labour MP. As

Housing Minister in the 1974-79 Labour government,

Freeson was a key political figure in the

development of co-operative housing. The Willesden

experience was taken up and promoted by another

co-operative party activist, Harold Campbell, who

published details in 1961 (Hands, 1975:108). The

project of replicating the Willesden experience

then became entangled in government support for a

mid-market private rented option, initiated in the

1961 Housing Act.


page 169

The 1961 Housing Act provided £25 million

in public funds for the development of "cost rent"

housing association and co-operative housing. The

government's main interest was in filling gaps in

the market for up-market renting and stepping

stones to owner occupation (Clapham, 1987).

Because the Act was seen as promoting a commercial

rental sector, the government indicated it wanted

new societies formed rather than see the existing

network of housing associations take it on.

Specifically, the government encouraged fee

earning consortia to set up boards composed of,

for instance, estate agents, solicitors, surveyors

etc., to promote the new schemes.

Harold Campbell, by his own account, went

in 1960 to see the then Parliamentary Secretary

for housing, Sir Keith Joseph - at the time "a

sort of moderate Fabian" rather than the right-

wing ideologue of later years (Thatcher, 1993:14)

- to persuade him to incorporate in government


page 170

thinking co-operative housing which Campbell, to

allay Conservative suspicion, dubbed "co-

ownership." Henry Brooke, his Minister, speaking

in the House of Commons on the 1961 Bill,

commended co-operatives:

They have a value of their own indeveloping mutual responsibility indeveloping mutual responsibilitybased on home ownership. (Allen,1982 p.60)

Initially, according to Allen, co-

ownership was seen as promoting a minority

interest in an "experiment in community living."

Very few schemes were developed using the 1961 Act

funding. Both Hands and Birchall tell us that, by

the time the co-ownership concept was sufficiently

developed as a legal form, the money had been

taken up. Three co-ownerships were developed in

South London under the name "H L Score." The H L

Score Housing Society, the H L Score (Central

Hill) Housing Society and the H L Score (Grange

Road) Housing Society provided 20, 24 and 22


page 171

dwellings respectively. The architects were Co-

operative Planning Ltd, of which the chair was

Harry Moncrief.

The 1964 Housing Act gave further support

to the co-ownership concept, and established the

Housing Corporation to fund and promote co-

ownerships and cost rents. The Corporation was

heavily populated with ex-colonial civil servants.

Senior staff included former Assistant Governors

of Sarawak and the Seychelles (Allen, 1982 p. 80).

In 1965 Harold Campbell and Harry Moncrief

set up the Co-ownership Development Society (CDS)

to promote and service co-ownerships nationally

(Hayhow, etc. 1977, p.9). The three H L Score co-

ops were among the original users, but two of them

withdrew complaining that it had become dominated

by fee-earning and professional interests (Hands,

1975, p. 109). On the CDS model, the agency


page 172

provided "founder members" who were the first

committee of the "daughter" co-operative. Tenants

joined and gradually assumed responsibility for

their co-op, but meanwhile, the founder members

had entered into an agency services agreement with

CDS.

CDS later set up a subsidiary, CDS Co-

operative Housing Society, to develop "par value"

co-operatives (where members did not hold personal

equity in the value of the housing and did not

stand to gain any financial premium) rather than

co-ownership schemes. On one view it took this

step "mainly because co-ownerships are financially

unsound" (Hayhow et al, 1977: 18).

Co-ownership provided rented housing, to

be funded by a collective mortgage, with a premium

available to a tenant on leaving. The premium was

to be based on the amount of mortgage repaid


page 173

during the period of a member's occupancy, plus a

percentage of the capitalised value of the

increase in the rent achievable on reletting. This

was to be funded by cash flow or additional

borrowing: there was no premium payable by

incoming members. The owning society qualified for

tax relief on its mortgage. Mutual co-operatives

were exempt from rent control. The Housing

Corporation was established to regulate and to

lend to co-ownerships as well as to self-build

societies.

Clapham (1987) and Birchall (1991) concur

on the fundamental problems with co-ownership. The

idea was ostensibly borrowed from Scandinavia, but

governments of both parties (Labour came to power

in 1964) were attracted purely to a financial

package that seemed to offer a stepping stone to

owner-occupation. The strength of the Scandinavian

model lay not so much in the financing as in their

ties to the trade union and social democratic


page 174

movements, strong co-operative development and

education, and sympathetic servicing arrangements

(Clapham, 1987).

Allen draws attention to another problem

that helps explain the disrepute into which co-

ownership fell. The option mortgage subsidy,

giving tax relief on the collective mortgage, and

the premium to members (fundable by the Housing

Corporation) made co-ownership more attractive

than cost renting. Meanwhile cost rents were in

serious difficulties owing to rising interest

rates. As a result, most cost rent schemes were

switched into co-ownerships, even though they were

promoted by fee earning boards with no interest in

the "experiment in community living" or even in

"mutual responsibility based on home ownership".

Eight thousand properties were involved in

transfer from cost rent to co-ownership and by

1970, the Corporation had approved another 20,000

units of co-ownership - mostly promoted by cost


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rent societies who mainly now became "parents" of

co-ownerships on the CDS model.

The British co-ownerships were mostly

built by sponsoring commercial agencies with

boards earning fees from the operation. "Founder

members" locked the client societies into their

management services, typically for 7 years. There

was no member involvement in housing development,

nor education for tenants to understand the co-

operative structures that nominally housed them.

Many service providers "ran their societies for

years without even informing the co-owners they

were anything more than tenants of the agent"

(Birchall, 1991, p.13). The Housing Corporation

was actively hostile to member involvement,

complaining as late as 1972 about "pettifogging

interference" by members in the work of agents.

Many schemes were badly built and inefficiently

managed from a distance. Of 800 societies approved

by 1970, 750 were "founder member" promotions.


page 176

The financial structure underlying co-

ownerships proved unsound as rising interest rates

squeezed cash flows. Council housebuilding

programmes offered cheap new homes for people

seeking to rent, while home owners were rewarded

with capital gains that co-ownerships could not

match. By the early seventies, co-ownerships were

in serious financial trouble. Subsidy was

introduced after 1974, and societies were

encouraged to sell to sitting tenants in the 1980s

The Government had originally expected

15,000 homes per year to be developed through the

Housing Corporation, with two thirds of the cost

to come from building societies to top up

mortgages from the Corporation. In the event, over

the eight years to 1972, 35,000 homes were

approved of which over 33,000 were co-ownerships -

even though 10,000 cost rent homes had been

approved by 1967 (Allen, 1982:93); and Corporation


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lending exceeded that from building societies.

However, as Allen notes:

If the Housing Corporation wassingularly unsuccessful inachieving the tasks prescribed forit, no one seemed to mind; in anycase government policy was normallyheading in another direction by thetime failure became apparent.

Government now needed a vehicle to develop

new agencies to replace the private landlord,

providing a "third force" alternative to the local

authorities and a means to effect rehabilitation

as an alternative to demolition of older inner

area housing. The vehicle was the Housing

Corporation; the new agencies were the housing

associations.

Within the new category of Registered

Housing Associations came long established

philanthropic charities; public utility societies

founded as co-partnership and charitable

developers in the first part of the twentieth


page 178

century; the newer associations focused on the

inner city issues of rehabilitation and race; the

self builders, co-ops and co-ownerships and the

commercial bodies promoted under the 1961 Act.

While retaining its original functions, as a

funder of self build and co-ownership, the

Corporation became both the provider of new grants

to Housing Associations and the Registrar

responsible for approving and policing the

associations. Conceived by the 1970-74

Conservative government under Edward Heath, this

structure was adopted and implemented by the

Labour Government elected in February 1974.

Under the new system, housing associations

bought, renovated and built homes for renting on

"fair rents" set by the Rent Officer Service. A

mortgage was set upon any one purchase or scheme,

based on the affordable loan after deducting

approved management and maintenance allowances

from rental income. Grant - Housing Association


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Grant or HAG - was paid to make up the balance

between approved scheme cost and mortgage. In

addition, provision was made for registered

associations to receive Revenue Deficit Grant from

the government to cover any losses on day to day

running. Generally most of the cost of purchase

and rehabilitation, or new building of homes was

met by HAG. It was not unknown, where rents were

very low, for a project to attract 100% HAG and

immediately move into revenue deficit. The 1974

Housing Act provided one of the most generous

subsidy systems of any state welfare measure ever,

and certainly the most generous ever produced for

housing.

Reg Freeson as housing minister brought

his co-operative background and enthusiasm into

office. He appointed Harold Campbell to chair a

committee to advise him on housing co-operatives.

Campbell reported in 1975 (DoE, 1975), and his

report formed the basis for DoE circular 8/76. It


page 180

recommended that new building or major

rehabilitation should be “initiated by a

sponsoring body such as a local authority or a

housing association rather than the eventual

members” and that new co-operative homes built on

this basis should be occupied by tenants

“specially selected” for their skills and

experience. Ten percent of Housing Corporation

expenditure was reserved for co-ops (never reached

in practice, the peak being 6% in 1986). Tenant

Management Co-operatives (TMCs) were to be

promoted in council estates, especially through

new construction for specially selected tenants.

The 1975 Housing Rents and Subsidies Act included

the necessary legislation for local authorities to

continue to receive subsidy on housing where the

management had been delegated to an approved TMC.

The legislation also allowed HAG to be paid to a

registered par value “mutual” co-operative (where

all members are tenants or prospective tenants and

only members can take a tenancy). A co-operative


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Housing Agency was established to promote co-

operatives, directed by John Hands. The Agency was

later absorbed into the Housing Corporation. It

made grants for promoting co-ops and training.

The opportunity to relaunch a housing co-

operative sector in the UK was thus shaped first

of all by the existence of a small co-operative

sector with close links to the Minister, this

sector being compromised by its association with

the commercial co-ownerships which it was now

promoting. Second there was the ready-made

structure of the Housing Corporation and the Bill,

inherited from the previous Government, to pump

substantial investment into a revamped voluntary

sector through an expanded Housing Corporation - a

voluntary sector into which the commercial co-

ownership promoters would be absorbed, along with

the small co-operative movement which had produced

their financial model.


page 182

A third factor determining the shape the

new co-operative sector would take was a set of

factors “from below” and which in a very loose

sense could be called an “urban social movement.”

The elements comprising this were:

The backlash against inner city

redevelopment. In most cities there were very

active resident campaigns against demolition.

Part of the alternative solution was to

establish voluntary sector landlords,

sometimes co-operatives, to purchase and

improve property. Local authorities were

using powers under the 1969 Act to make

improvement grants, to owner occupiers as

well as housing associations and co-

operatives, to back local authority mortgages

which had been used for much longer to

support small scale housing rehabilitation.

Squatting, seen as a legitimate response

to the housing shortages combined with empty,


page 183

usually publicly owned, homes. Squatter

groups, such as the Committee of the Faceless

Homeless in Tower Hamlets, founded many

housing co-ops in London, especially

legitimate "short life" co-operatives set up

in housing bought and vacated by councils for

planned clearance (Hayhow, et al 1977:3). The

main British study researching "urban social

movements" identified eight housing co-

operatives resulting from the "best

organised" squatter groups (Lowe, 1986:144).

Anxiety about race . Black communities were

dependent on inner city, poor quality,

privately rented housing, and official

landlords, overtly or through the rules

governing waiting lists, discriminated

against black applicants. The Holloway

Tenants Co-op, arising from the North

Islington Housing Rights Project and

associated with such influential figures as

Anne Power (a cop-operative housing activist


page 184

associated with the formation of Priority

Estates Project and now at the London School

of Economics) and Chris Homes (later director

of the Society for Co-operative Dwellings and

now of Shelter) was a multiracial project

inspired partly by concern over racism in

private rental and council housing.

Complementing these, the emergence of

community-minded political activists hostile

to state sponsored social provision, often

having been politicised in the protest

movements of 1960s. Harris (1987) analysed

the Canadian urban reform movement - a social

movement active in Canadian urban

redevelopment issues including the

development of co-operative housing - as part

of an international trend influenced by such

factors as the rise of the new left in the

1950s, the Vietnam war and the civil rights

movement.


page 185

From the interaction of these forces we

find the North Islington Housing Rights Project,

working with black communities on housing repair

and developing the Holloway Tenants Co-operative

in 1972 (HTC, 1977); the 1970 Shelter

Neighbourhood Action Project in multiracial Granby

(Liverpool), leading to the Granby Housing Co-

operative in 1971 and Canning Housing Co-operative

in 1972; the squatter based short life co-ops that

formed in London in 1974; and Student Co-operative

Dwellings, formed in 1968 and renamed the Society

for Co-operative Dwellings in 1974. Researchers

from Dame Colet House (Hayhow et al:1977) also

identified the owner occupiers' self help Black

Road Action Group in Macclesfield, formed in 1968

and associated especially with Rod Hackney, as

part of this movement. They studied altogether ten

co-ops in East London, seventeen elsewhere, and

seven other groups, all formed from 1968 to 1976.


page 186

The three forces that shaped co-operative

housing were thus the Housing Corporation with its

colonial civil servants now operating the welfare

housing project embodied in the 1974 Act; the

blend of political and commercial entrepreneurship

expressed in the figure of Harold Campbell and his

CDS; and the urban radicalism combining anti-

council, anti-racism, anti-demolition and

squatting in the inner cities. This highly

unstable blend of forces converged on Liverpool in

the mid 1970s.

Conclusion to chapter 4

A historical case study has been chosen to

research user empowerment in a context of

innovation and political conflict. The particular

episode to be studied is the development of the

new build housing co-operatives in Liverpool. Co-

operative housing has a historical association

with the project of creating a new moral order

through political and economic communitarianism,


page 187

but more realistically can be considered as a case

of user control. From the late 1950s efforts to

relaunch a British co-operative housing sector had

resulted in mainly commercial initiatives with

little user involvement, sponsored by a government

organisation that was antipathetic to user

activism. These two forces now engaged with

radical urban movements for which co-operatives

were a possible instrument of urban change.


page 188

Chapter 5

Case study: new-build co-operative housing

in Liverpool

Liverpool - political and social background

Liverpool is a seaport which rose in the

nineteenth century to be a major centre for

British Imperial commerce, its shipping serving

the American and West African trade especially. It

has attracted immigration from Ireland and from

coastal peoples from all over the world, with a

black community dating its local roots back to the

eighteenth century at least. Its economy has been

in relative decline since the First World War, and

for most of the twentieth century its unemployment

has run at twice the UK average. It is an English

city known for its "otherness:" for an aggressive

independence, a sharp sense of humour, for

producing wits, entertainers, criminals, trade

union activists; and for being culturally Irish,

Welsh and even American as much as English.


page 189

The inner city is spread over the Mersey

river frontage, split by the city centre into a

"north end" and a "south end" with distinct local

identities and a mutual rivalry.

Liverpool in the nineteenth century was a

national and even international leader in using

the power of the local state to address its

outstandingly bad public health and housing

problems. Private builders were obliged by local

bye-laws to build to minimum sanitary standards,

and Liverpool is usually regarded as the first

British city to build council housing. In the

early twentieth century, its university pioneered

the study and development of "town planning." This

belief in the use of state power to reshape the

urban environment through land development and

housing layout control rose to marked prominence

in British thinking on the question of urban and

social reform (Sutcliffe, 1981).


page 190

Liverpool city council was, most unusually

among major cities, controlled by the Conservative

Party for over 100 years up to 1955, after which

Labour took office and had a majority on the

council for nine out of fifteen years until 1970.

The period from 1970 to 1983 was dominated by the

rise of the Liberals, who were the largest party

on the council in 1974 and 1975. They held the

chairs of the council with Conservative support in

1978 and from 1980 to 1983. From 1983 to 1987,

the Labour Party controlled the council and was

associated with domination by "Militant." In 1987

the Labour councillors were disqualified for not

setting a legal budget, and after a brief Liberal

interregnum a newly elected, more orthodox Labour

Party group came to power. Since 1987 the city has

been run by the Labour Party, though with shifting

alliances among the factions on, or associated

with, or thought to be associated with, the

"left."


page 191

Irish and religious politics have been an

important local factor. The city council had Irish

Nationalist councillors from 1885 to 1929, and

Protestant Party councillors as late as 1971. Lane

(1987) argues that Labour rose in wards where it

had the support of "respectable," unionised

workers in stable employment. But much of the

city's population was casually employed in dock

and seafaring related work, alienated from both

official trade unionism and the Labour Party. The

Protestant working class feared competition from

the local Roman Catholic community. Labour

absorbed the Catholic vote, organised through the

parishes, on the decline of the local Irish

Nationalists. The Conservatives, with influence

and connections based on the powerful central

business district with its commodity broking,

finance and insurance centres, and then radiating

out through employers and small tradespeople, had

a strong feeling for local sensibilities.


page 192

Although a city of mass poverty and social

instability, Liverpool was never regarded as a

hotbed of revolution. After a riot in Liverpool in

1911, Churchill advised the House of Commons not

to be perturbed since "it took place in an area

where disorder is a common feature." Ramsay

MacDonald considered Liverpool "rotten" and the

Communists gave it up as impossible to organise.

Its poverty aroused a paternalistic concern and

pity, but not a fear of revolution.

Liverpool - background to housing policy to 1974

After the First World War, when national

policy moved decisively towards Council housing as

the main form of working class provision,

Liverpool created a powerful, architecturally led

housing department that built "planned" cottage


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suburbs such as Speke. In keeping with national

trends, Liverpool concentrated on council housing

as its main means of providing better quality

homes for the working class. At first this meant

cottage housing of relatively high quality,

generally in the suburbs. Later, as national

policy changed towards cheaper solutions built at

higher densities to meet identified need including

slum clearance, Liverpool built "tenements": flats

up to six stories high, accessed by stairways and

balconies, mostly in the inner city. A similar

pattern occurred after the Second World War: large

scale suburban cottage housing in the 1940s, walk-

up flats in the 1950s, high rise flats in the

1960s. By the end of the sixties, with policy and

public opinion moving against high flats, the city

was designing high density, low rise estates,

including inner-city projects modelled on "Cornish

fishing villages" or "Italian hill villages" with

back-to-back houses wrapped into intimate

walkways, inserted into high crime stress areas.


page 194

In the 1980s, Liverpool was already developing

programmes for major refurbishment and even

demolition of council estates completed as

recently as 1974.

Even so, Liverpool entered the 1970s with

a higher proportion of pre-1919 housing than any

other city. In the 1950s forty percent of all such

homes were declared unfit, leading to a planned

clearance programme of 88,000 homes, of which

78,000 were planned for clearance in 25 years, and

33,000 were demolished in a "stage 1" programme

from 1966 to 1973. Twenty seven thousand were

supposed to follow in a planned "stage 2" starting

in 1974 (Roberts, 1986). A 1966 National Building

Agency report, recommending a switch into large

scale rehabilitation, was rejected by the council

(Bullock, 1994). The growing unpopularity and

untenability of the demolition programme asserted

itself in the rise of the Liberal Party, one of

whose major campaign themes was to "pension off


page 195

the bulldozer." The Liverpool Liberal party

attracted young activists, politicised in the

radicalism of the 1960s, who campaigned on inner

city housing issues. Among these were David Alton,

who was closely associated with the politics of

housing rehabilitation before becoming a Liverpool

MP in 1979, and Chris Davies, who campaigned on

housing and other issues full time for several

years before winning the inner city Abercromby

ward in 1980, and later entered Parliament at the

Saddleworth by-election in 1995.

A revised "stage 2" clearance programme

adopted in 1972 reduced the planned number to

8,400. In the event only 2,000 were demolished.

Rehabilitation now became the ordering principle

of inner city housing policy.

Housing politics had once been dominated

by a broad Labour-Conservative consensus for


page 196

planned council housing gradually to rehouse the

inner city, which would be demolished. Now the

housing department split into an Improvements

Division identified with the Liberals, and a

Programme (clearance/newbuild) Division identified

with Labour (Houlihan, 1988:153-4). Further

cleavages developed around ownership. In contrast

to other cities, for example many London boroughs,

Liverpool had no agenda for the council to

rehabilitate ex-private sector homes on its own

account. Owner occupation or housing association

ownership for rent were the two main options in

improvement areas. Hence the fault line becomes:

Labour/programme/management vs.

Liberals/improvement/housing associations. Labour

maintained its safe seats in the outer suburbs

where large council estates were concentrated, and

its support in inner city tenement and high flat

blocks. But the rehabilitation issue meant Labour

could never be safe in inner city wards with run-


page 197

down terraces, especially when that was combined

with a strong Protestant tradition.

The emerging inner city housing providers,

the housing associations, had a disparate history.

There were two growing charities. Merseyside

(previously Liverpool) Improved Houses (MIH) dated

back to the 1930s when it had been established as

a charitable public utility society. Liverpool

Housing Trust (LHT) was a newer church initiative

backed by Shelter. These two bodies had inner city

improvement for the benefit of the community as

their purpose. They used local authority mortgages

and improvement grants, and benefited from

fundraising by Shelter. However, many housing

associations were co-ownership promoters - set up

under the 1961 Act as essentially commercial

organisations. They had already made the

transition, as the previous chapter described,

from cost-rent to co-ownership. As the market

shifted towards rehabilitation to meet need, the


page 198

co-ownership agencies, in keeping with the

national picture, moved towards this activity,

positioning themselves to register under the 1974

Act.

Co-operatives were another "player" In

Liverpool. As well as being directly involved in

developing and funding housing associations,

Shelter ran the Shelter Neighbourhood Action

Project (SNAP) in 1969/1970. SNAP was an early

example of neighbourhood change promoted by

addressing community participation. It developed

into the promotion of housing co-operatives, a

process in which most of the activists were local

middle class owner occupiers. SNAP served the

multi-racial Granby area of Toxteth. It led to the

creation of the Granby housing co-operative in

1972 and Canning Housing Co-operative, in an area

of Georgian terraces popular with young people, in

1973. The Co-operatives saw themselves as offering

a radical alternative to the paternalistic and


page 199

commercial housing associations. Like MIH and LHT,

they used local authority grants and mortgages to

develop. When the 1974 Housing Act was passed, the

co-operatives also positioned themselves to use

the new grant system.

In Liverpool, at the time the 1974 Act was

being passed, a property investment company went

into liquidation with around 3,000 terraced homes

in inner city areas. It was known as the

"Hibernian" or "Realmdeal" portfolio. The property

was initially purchased, as a holding operation,

by Family Housing Association pending a division

of interest between the Liverpool associations -

charities and co-ownership promoters.

Housing rehabilitation in Liverpool was

accomplished through "zoning" of housing

associations (HAs) to particular areas. All local

associations were accommodated within the zoning


page 200

system. They then carried out renovation of

properties, using the large Hibernian portfolio as

a base. This was followed by small portfolios sold

by landlords, individual purchases of homes from

needy owner occupiers, and - the most substantial

source of growth - blocks of property bought by

the City using compulsory purchase powers under

the 1974 Act, and sold on to the zoned HA.

Following acquisition, the association spent a

substantial amount of money - comparable with the

amounts needed to build a new home - on

renovation. Funding for acquisition and

improvement came through loans from either the

City or (more commonly) the Housing Corporation

(HC), converted into a grant following completion.

This grant was the full cost of provision, less

the capitalised value of the net rental income

which was calculated as first year's rent less

standard running costs. The maximum rent was a

"Fair Rent" set by the rent officer on the 1965

Act formula created to regulate private sector


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rents. However most tenants were on controlled

rents which were considerably lower. On a fair

rented property, HAG was usually around 95%: in

other words, the rent paid by the tenant would

meet only 5% of the debt charges incurred by

bringing the home up to required standards. On

controlled rents, the association normally needed

a 100% grant and an additional revenue subsidy,

known as revenue deficit grant, since the rent did

not meet the accepted costs of management and

maintenance. Private landlords did not qualify for

these grants but could get the much lower levels

of grant for which owner occupiers were eligible.

Generally the system meant that in each zone, the

selected HA would be the only vehicle for

rehabilitation for rent to the HC's requirements.

The balance of zonings received by each HA meant

that each HA would receive enough business to

ensure its survival, although the HC decided on

some to proceed to be "big players." The identity

of the zones themselves was largely a matter


page 202

decided by the City, mainly on a "worst first"

basis: the zones receiving the most funds were

those capable of being saved but with the worst

stock condition.

Co-operative housing in Liverpool

We have seen that a significant influence

on both national and local housing policy in the

1960s was the new charity Shelter and the campaign

it represented. Shelter sponsored the development

locally on Liverpool of a church based initiative,

Liverpool Housing Trust, and the Shelter

Neighbourhood Action Project (SNAP) as a

community-based project in the multi-racial Granby

area. This led to the formation of a housing co-

operative.

A key figure in the creation of the Granby

co-operative was Don Simpson, who worked as a

council housing officer in Speke and was an owner


page 203

occupier in Granby. His wife ran a local credit

union. He believed a housing co-op was the best

vehicle for local rehabilitation because it would

respect community ties: he had been influenced

especially by reading studies of kinship and its

importance in sustaining local communities

(Kinghan and McCabe, 1978). His experience of

housing associations was that they would rehouse

people on the basis of need and disregard

neighbourhood and family ties. He also considered

housing associations to be paternalistic and

hostile to tenant choice in housing design. Co-

operatives would offer the benefits of preserving

personal links in allocations policy, and provide

housing designs that reflected consumer

preference.

Don Simpson recruited other local owner

occupiers and their families to the co-operative

cause. Colin Parker (who was interviewed for this

research) lived with his parents in the home they


page 204

owned off Lodge Lane, close to Granby, while

studying English and Philosophy at Liverpool

University. Inspired by Simpson's talk at a local

residents' meeting, he was persuaded to form the

Lodge Lane East Housing Co-op. At this time Granby

co-op owned one house. Another co-op, Canning,

consisted entirely of (in Parker's words) "the

arty-farty middle class." The emergent co-ops were

using Clement Evans Wilkinson, an architectural

and surveying practice that had worked on the SNAP

project, to design and supervise their renovation

projects. Clement Evans Wilkinson employed Tom

Clay, a young architect, recently graduated from

Liverpool University. Tom Clay married a worker

for the Holloway Tenant Co-operative and he

obtained a co-operative home in the Granby area.

Simpson persuaded the activists to form

Neighbourhood Housing Services as a co-op-run

architectural and development service agency, with

Paul Harman of Canning, an actor with the Everyman


page 205

Theatre, as chair and Colin Parker as secretary.

This would capture the fees being paid to Clement

Evans Wilkinson and enable the profit to support

an expanding co-op movement. After an interview

that Tom Clay (who was also interviewed for this

research) recalls as lasting for six hours, much

of it a wine-drinking session, he was appointed as

the architect for NHS, and opened the new co-

operatively-owned architectural practice in a

former shoe repair shop in the Granby area.

As Kinghan and McCabe (1978) showed, a key

weakness in Granby co-op especially was that it

was a "professional" initiative run by non-locals

and it failed to educate its membership or develop

real member control. Colin Parker says that in

Granby co-op

the leading lights were owneroccupiers who were trained housingprofessionals who had a vision -not local people wanting to becomeinvolved in the administration oftheir housing.


page 206

Parker abandoned his university course to

concentrate on being NHS's secretary and later

became a paid NHS employee. Don Simpson went on to

be a Director of Housing for Rochdale; Colin

Parker to be a senior housing manager with a small

housing association; and Tom Clay to be

Development Director with MIH and the Liverpool

Housing Action Trust.

Parker describes the then team at NHS as

very young, enthusiastic and notvery competent. We all had thisvision. We thought we were better.We had God on our side. We believedin consumer sovereignty ... We wereaccountable. No one else was. Eventhough the method of accountabilitywas entirely of our own choosing.

While clearly defined consumption benefits

were to follow from co-operative provision, it is

also true to say that the SNAP-inspired co-

operatives were the projects of aspiring


page 207

professionals who saw themselves as better than

other providers because of their commitment to

consumer control. Colin Parker believes this

commitment did translate into a more sensitive

service and that NHS was ahead of other HAs in

offering choice in the design of their homes. But

primarily, tenants wanted an effective public

landlord and were, he recalls, "highly suspicious"

about "this trip being laid on them."

Neighbourhood Housing Services was

developed as a “secondary co-operative” - a

service agency to be owned and control by the

“primary” co-operative members. It is clear

however that it was formed by owner occupiers and

co-operative members several of whom were building

housing careers, in some cases through employment

in NHS itself. Local owner occupiers played a

leading role in the housing rehabilitation

campaigns in other areas - and this is not

surprising: owner occupiers stood to protect a


page 208

personal property investment. But Granby attracted

a number of "settlers" who were not local but who

aspired to develop a local housing movement, out

of which some gained jobs.

The 1974 Housing Act offered (in Parker's

words) the "panacea" of HAG but the rapid growth

of HAs, combined with zoning, presented NHS with a

dilemma. Paul Harman, as chair of NHS, wanted a

choice of a co-op to be offered to every

prospective HA tenant, but the authorities

rejected this flatly. The next proposal was to

offer a ballot in every zoned area, giving tenants

the choice of a co-operative or a conventional HA.

This was resisted by the HAs. How then should the

emerging co-op sector fit in? After a vigorous

debate in NHS's committee, Don Simpson carried the

day with a proposal that NHS should have zoned

status in the Toxteth improvement areas. Parker

remembers that by common consent this meant


page 209

“buying property over the heads of the tenants and

then pretending that you are a co-op.”

But the "vision" carried the day - the

commitment to consumer choice meant that any "co-

op" would be better than any "landlord." So a

substantial part of Liverpool 8 - the area

comprising Granby and Toxteth - was zoned into

"co-operatives" for the purpose of an area

improvement strategy. Kensington Fields in

Liverpool 7, part of the political base of David

Alton, was later included in the "co-op" zoning.

In the recognition of provider interests,

a national dimension now emerged. The Housing

Minister, Reg Freeson, was a co-op enthusiast and

the early intention was that ten percent of HAG

should go into co-ops. His chief adviser was

Harold Campbell, a fellow Co-operative Party

activist and a long standing advocate of co-


page 210

operative housing, who had been one of the authors

of the co-ownership system. In the Liverpool

zoning, the authorities arranged a partnership

with Harold Campbell's, CDS, based in Balham in

south London. The initials had originally stood

for Co-ownership Development Society, but with the

decline of co-ownership, the agency had set up CDS

Co-operative Housing Services known as CDS. An

architectural practice, Co-operative Planning Ltd

(CPL) had close links with CDS and its clients.

Under the new registration criteria, housing

association boards now had to be voluntary. Most

co-ownership promoters were registered and had to

divest their committees of fee-earners. As late as

1977, there were ex-co-ownership promoters with

fee earning committee members. Although the

Corporation was pressing for their removal, it was

not withholding funding. Where fee earners had

withdrawn they sometimes continued to be

influential - often "still maintaining a close

influence on day to day running" to the extent


page 211

that "in some cases the power of the lay committee

was purely nominal" (Allen, 1982:162). In the case

of CDS, the registered association, CDSCHS, had an

all-volunteer board. However they relied for all

servicing on the Co-ownership Development Society,

which had a fee-earning board overlapping with

that of Co-operative Planning Limited (CPL).

The Liverpool arrangement, taking in

effect in 1975, was that, in half the "co-op"

zones, NHS would both own and manage the stock. In

the rest, CDS would own but NHS act as managing

agent. The architectural contract on CDS owned

properties would go to CPL - a requirement on

which the Housing Corporation insisted, despite

the fact that the properties were managed by NHS

with an in-house architectural capability, and

that Liverpool was well endowed with experienced

local surveyors and architects with renovation

expertise. As a result, short life repairs on

terraced homes in central Liverpool - emergency


page 212

roof work and wiring - were designed and

supervised by new build specialists in south

London. There was no local support for what Parker

calls "this stupid idea" with an architectural

product Tom Clay describes as “naff.” There was no

parallel in the rest of the Liverpool HA zoning

for the imposition of an outside owner and an

outside architect. But with the national interest

in co-ops came a national client (CPL/CDS) with a

national patron (Harold Campbell's base in the

DoE).

An extremely bitter episode followed. A

CDSCHS Director who was a co-opted member of NHS's

committee, reported to the London Board that NHS

were incompetent and should be relieved of their

management contract. Colin Parker, as secretary,

was deputed to go to London to "pull the fat out

of the fire" but feels that by then NHS had

already been "stitched up" - although there had

never been any complaint to the NHS committee,

London had started to recruit staff for a local


page 213

CDS management office even before the CDSCHS

Committee had met to consider the situation. Tom

Clay, by then Director of NHS, believes that NHS

and the local Liverpool co-operatives were quite

powerless in this situation: CDS had always

intended to establish a local base.

The new, young CDSCHS regional manager,

Catherine Meredith, was recruited from the

council's improvements division, where she had

been acting head but was not offered the post

permanently, and two of her colleagues joined her

from the authority to form the initial staff team

in 1976. A local committee, known as the

"Liverpool committee of CDS:CHS," was set up with

a majority of tenant representatives from the six

patches or "co-ops" where the agency was zoned. A

minority of five members was made of sympathetic

professionals and academics, with Noel Boaden, of

Liverpool University, in the chair. As a result of


page 214

the termination of the CDS management contract,

NHS had to make redundancies in 1977.

The young management team and its

committee felt under pressure. Sophy Krajewska,

who had worked in the improvements division with

Catherine Meredith before joining CDS's regional

office as housing manager, recalls

tremendous pressure on CDS and NHSto perform. LHT and MIH had toshare stock with a newcomer, withupstarts with airy-fairy staffabout co-ops. We had to deliver andthat meant managing a rehabprogramme.

Stock needed urgent repairs to wiring and

roofs and the Liverpool CDS was locked into

architectural services from CPL in south London.

"Shambles" and "mess" are the words used by former

staff in recalling the situation with the repairs

programme. Adrian Moran, who was Project Co-

ordinator, remembers a turning point in his own

thinking about the relationship with London: it


page 215

came when Board members came on a visit of

inspection and saw houses in a General Improvement

Area boarded up, awaiting renovation. "Can't the

poor people afford windows?" a Board member asked.

It became clear that the only way to break

the relationship with CPL was to sever the London

connection altogether. CDS Co-operative Housing

Society had an independent committee but was

wholly reliant on the Co-ownership Development

Society for staff services, and Co-ownership

Development Society's committee overlapped heavily

with that of CPL. While questionable, this kind of

duality was not regarded by the Housing

Corporation as a cause for serious alarm at the

time: as we have seen, the ex-co-ownership

associations typically had considerable residual

influence from fee-earning interests, and the

Corporation's approach appeared to be to phase it

out gently; it was even tolerating illegal

situations where fee-earners still belonged to the


page 216

controlling committee, which was not the case with

CDSCHS. Among the tactics used by Liverpool

managers to force the Housing Corporation to query

the London-Liverpool link was to use their

membership of the London County Council branch of

the local government union NALGO, whose officials

arranged a meeting with the Housing Corporation.

Eventually the Housing Corporation conceded and

agreed to register the regional branch as a new

housing association. The Liverpool CDS:CHS stock

was transferred to it on 1st April 1977. CDS Co-

operative Housing Society established its own

staffing at about the same time. Both the original

CDS and CPL eventually went into liquidation - in

the case of CPL, following an action for

negligence commenced by CDS Co-operative Housing

Society in connection with a major building

failure in a co-operative housing scheme. CDS CHS

is now called the “Co-operative Development

Society” trading as CDS Co-operatives, and is a


page 217

successful, well established secondary co-

operative.

The new local body formed in Liverpool in

1977 decided to keep the initials CDS, on the

basis that these were known to tenants and

continuity was important. The new body was called

"Co-operative Development Services (Liverpool)

ltd" or CDS. CDS's main priority was the rapid

execution of full rehabilitation to its stock: 99

homes were renovated in the first full year,

compared with two in the entire period up to the

handover.

CDS's stock continued to be split into

"co-ops" and the development path following the

old CDS "founder member" model, should have been

for CDS to renovate the property, recruit tenant

members and hand stock over to the co-ops. Staff

were concerned that this was an artificial


page 218

approach which tenants, if anything, opposed if

explained to them. Tenants wanted a competent

landlord, consultation and the means to hold the

landlord accountable if something went wrong.

Tenants were enthusiastic about attending meetings

over specific issues but largely opposed to a

transfer of responsibility. Their aspirations

could best be met by continuing with CDS as a

landlord, holding local meetings and attracting

tenant representatives onto the management

committee. Co-ops should be developed only where

prospective members wanted them. In adopting this

strategy in 1978, CDS was motivated by a belief

that the agency needed to hold on to its assets if

it was to survive in the longer term.

NHS followed the stock transfer route. It

paid a lot of attention to co-op education, and

was arguably quite successful in generating a co-

op consciousness among its clients. But the strong

sense of loyalty to NHS as a service agency owned


page 219

by the original customers meant that they remained

captive clients to its service. NHS did little to

diversify its customer base. Its lack of assets,

and its limited flow of work, led to its demise.

Tom Clay left the organisation, partly because of

its lack of interest in competing for new work.

NHS closed in 1987, its interest as service

provider passing to MIH, LHT and CDS. Granby co-op

was also closed, but fifty tenants were allowed to

remain in a new organisation serviced by CDS,

known as Toxteth Park Co-op. The rest of its stock

was divided between MIH and LHT.

The co-ops were, thus far, integrated into

the "normal" pattern of housing production - a

pattern of zoned agencies offering a local

monopoly provider of collectively consumed housing

services. CDS's strategy appeared to consolidate

this pattern by presenting itself as a more or

less conventional HA in its rehab zones.


page 220

The other aspect of the 1978 CDS strategy

was to present a choice of co-op to those who

wanted it. Attempts to promote this choice in

improvement zones never met with success. But by

the time the strategy was adopted a more promising

route, producing a much more aggressive player on

the co-op scene, had arrived.

Weller Way - co-operatives and new building

Part of the inherited CDS stock lay in

areas zoned for clearance rather than renovation.

The largest was the Dickens Streets - Pecksniff,

Copperfield etc. - off Weller Street in Liverpool

8. CDS owned around a quarter of the 320 occupied

homes. CDS tenants were to move to vacant CDS

properties following completion of the renovation

programmes in other local patches; there was also

the longer term possibility of new building by

CDS. CDS tenants were designated the "Dickens Co-

op" and the clearance area had its representative

on the CDS Liverpool committee. The idea of a co-

op was thus planted in the area and led to a


page 221

suggestion that a co-operative to undertake new

building would be feasible. It was thrown around

at brainstorming sessions led by some CDS tenants

and staff, but dominated by other local residents

(private tenants and owner occupiers). Many people

wanted local rehousing which would keep the

existing community together. No established route

was open to achieve this. There was no council new

building, and even if there was, priority would be

determined by the allocations policy's date order

criteria, not by community ties. CDS had new build

plans but would give priority to its own tenants.

A co-operative would house people who wanted to

join it, and put people where they wanted to live.

The Weller Streets Co-operative was formed

in 1977, initially with 80 members. After a period

when membership was open to any local resident,

the list had been closed. Its membership included

private tenants and owner occupiers, and about

twenty CDS tenants. The chair, Billy Floyd, ran


page 222

the local milk round, and was known as something

of a "hard case." Later membership fell to just

over sixty, as people dropped out after finding

alternative rehousing. The estate built had a mix

of two-storey family houses with gardens and

sheltered flats, each home having its own private

garden.

The Weller Streets was the first of the

new build co-ops which would offer a radical

change in the balance of power between producers

and users. Weller Streets members chose to join,

and, in so doing, asserted their right to a new

property on a site of their choosing and to a high

degree of participation in design. They were also

asserting their right to sustain existing

community ties by a collective decision as to

entitlement to membership. They proceeded to

assert also a right to the selection of their

architects, housing production agents and their

eventual managers (McDonald, 1986).


page 223

The Weller streets co-op established a

model which was entirely new and was then widely

taken up in Liverpool and elsewhere in Merseyside.

This model was widely praised in the architectural

press (Wates, 1982, 1984) and in the media. A BBC

series on architecture in 1986 included an full

half hour documentary on the Liverpool new build

co-ops as an architectural model (Power to the People,

BBC education 1986). The co-ops selected their own

architects after competitive interview and created

distinctively different estate layouts and house

designs (CDS, 1994). In 1994, the new build model

had generated twenty eight co-operatives with

nearly 1,500 homes (including the Eldonians, who

started as a co-op but are now reclassified as a

"community based housing association"). Another

six co-operatives building nearly 300 homes were

"municipalised" in 1983 in the episode dealt with

in detail later.1

1These figures are derived from CDS (1987) and CDS (1994) and include post-1988 "partnership" arrangements but excludehousing association-constructed participation projects.


page 224

The “model” was that occupants of homes

that were included in demolition programmes formed

co-operatives, typically comprising thirty or

forty households but ranging from 17 to over 100

households. They usually identified prospective

sites - generally derelict land or planned

clearance land, owned by the council and of little

value, although a few co-ops were able to

negotiate for more valuable sites. They selected a

“development agency.” This was a housing

association (or, in theory, a private body: the

co-ops would themselves be registered housing

associations and could, in principle use any

organisation as a service agency, but in practice

the necessary expertise and credibility lay with

the registered HAs ). The traditional co-operative

model is that services should be provided by After 1988, new co-ops were not registered to own estates but could control design and management using a chosen housing association as service provider. The CDS list requires some interpretation since it includes "participation" schemes by LHT but excludes partnership co-ops involving associations other than CDS, MIH and LHT. The estimate provided here is conservative.


page 225

“secondary” co-ops owned by the “primaries,” and

NHS conformed to this model. But NHS made little

or no effort to develop new business, instead

concentrating mainly on servicing the “captive”

customer co-ops established in its zones. Once CDS

started to develop the “newbuild” model, MIH and

later LHT followed suit, and soon it became common

for the new build co-operatives to interview

several associations. All the co-ops followed the

Weller Streets model and interviewed competing

firms of architects. The architect to Weller

Streets, Building Design Group (BDG), had been

formed by David Wilkinson, formerly a partner in

Clement Evans Wilkinson with experience on SNAP

and the first NHS co-ops. BDG recruited young

Liverpool University graduates with a vision for

what later become known as “community

architecture”. One of these, Bill Halsall, later

became a partner in the firm (now known as

Wilkinson Hindle Halsall Lloyd), developed

techniques and processes with Weller streets that


page 226

became widely used as models for tenant

participation in new housing design (for example,

RIBA/IOH, 1988). As other co-ops developed, other

architects became involved, including many regular

“commercial” housing architects without a pre-

existing interest in participation. As well as

selecting architects, the co-ops often selected

Quantity Surveyors and Structural Engineers

following competitive interview. The design

processes for the new sites were heavily

participative. Although a design committee might

be appointed to oversee and co-ordinate the

process, it was common for general meetings

attended by most members to take all design

decisions, starting with rough sketch plans and

simple block models. Often members worked in small

groups while a team from the architectural

practice circulated through the groups. To get

ideas about scale, members drew plans of their own

homes. Visits to sites elsewhere in the region

provided a basis to develop visions of how the


page 227

final estate should be shaped. Visits to these

sites and to stockists were used to select

materials. Individual homes were often

personalised with special details, although co-ops

varied as to how far they would encourage personal

quirks that a new tenant might not accept. There

was always turnover in membership during the three

to five years it took to develop homes, so new

members from the waiting list might inherit a home

personalised to a predecessor. The most

distinctive aspect of all the new build co-ops

(which of course stand today, often small pockets

of well ordered housing amidst the rampant chaos

and degraded environments of inner city Toxteth)

is their handling of communal spaces - the

circulation, car parking, common landscaping, play

spaces, mutual overlooking, boundary treatments

and so on - designed around what the co-op thought

it could mange itself (in some cases new fencing

and re-laid soft landscape showing how difficult

this proved - but also that the co-op had the


page 228

means to resolve the problems created.) On moving

into the homes, tenants paid Fair Rents (changed

for new tenants in the 1988 Act) and had no right

to buy (mutual co-ops are exempt from the right to

buy and indeed all statutory control on the

tenancy agreement). The co-ops owned the estates

and either managed them themselves on a self help

basis or, more commonly, selected a service agency

(usually a HA) to manage the estate. The new-build

co-ops routinely re-tender these management

contracts. The co-ops also have their own lists of

competing maintenance contractors.

The Weller Streets model offered a break

with official thinking on co-operatives, enshrined

in circular 8/76 and based on Harold Campbell's

work. This envisaged that, where new building or

major rehabilitation work was involved, the co-op

should be "initiated by a local authority or a

housing association rather than by the eventual

members" and that co-op members should be


page 229

"specially selected" for their interests and

skills. Weller Streets claimed the opposite: that

control of a major, lengthy development programme

should be the foundation of a co-op, and that

members should join if they wished because they

were entitled to a home with no other barrier. In

Weller Streets, as in most of the subsequent co-

ops, membership was open to anyone in the

clearance catchment area who chose to join up to a

specified cut-off date when a site would be

identified. All the co-operatives were subject to

council nominations, so that the membership lists

had to agreed by the council as qualifying for

nominee status.

The co-op members and the political and

professional agents around them were well aware

that they were attempting what conventional wisdom

held to be inconceivable. There were elements of

utopianism and class war mixed in with practical

home-building. A local Labour councillor and


page 230

prominent, progressive medical doctor, Cyril

Taylor, told them: “You're offering these people

dreams. These pensioners deserve more than this.”

The following extract records the comments

of a community worker, Rory Heap, who played a key

early role with the co-op, and members, including

Steve Cossack who was the area representative on

CDS's committee:

Rory Heap says: "The curious thingabout early enthusiasm was, it wasbased upon vision and anger, notupon any rigorous sense of whatmight happen." The experiences ofpast generations, and thefrustration of previous efforts todo something about the housingconditions in the area, cametogether. Ann Byrne says, "It wasanger for us. We just wanted tosmack 'em, to put one over on them,like." Steve Cossack says that whatdrew him to the co-op idea was "theidea of beating the pigs at theirown game. These so-and-so's haveput me in an unenviable position. Iwant to say, "You've put me in apit and I've climbed out of itmyself.'"


page 231

For the women, though there was often more

of an emphasis on getting rehoused. Kitty says:

"To us, we wanted a better house for us and our

kids." The practical necessity of getting

something done about their housing backed the urge

for a fight, and the idealism of believing in the

community and wanting it to stay together. Stephen

Rice comments: "The lack of action by the council

fostered this kind of kamikaze attitude that we've

got nothing, so we've got nothing to lose. It's a

nice attitude in that you can take anybody on."

(McDonald, 1986 p. 20)

As they started to be successful, Weller

Streets Co-op encountered antagonism: Cyril Taylor

told CDS that they should "come down like a ton of

bricks" on the co-op. They campaigned aggressively

for a site and were offered one at Hesketh Street,

Aigburth at the behest of the Liberal leader and

Aigburth ward councillor, Trevor Jones. The site

was too small for the co-op but they were able to


page 232

"swap" it for another site designated for

rehousing of CDS tenants: Weller Streets got the

CDS site, at Miles and Byles Streets in Toxteth,

while the Hesketh Street site was developed as a

second co-op for CDS tenants and members of an NHS

co-op in Lark Lane, Aigburth (Ospina, 1987:64-87).

The Weller streets co-op formed in 1977

and moved into its first completed homes in 1981.

The second new build co-operative, Hesketh St,

started in 1978. Both of these were funded by the

Housing Corporation. Once building work started on

the Miles/Byles street site, in 1980, the idea was

credible and started to attract public notice.

The third newbuild co-operative - Prince

Albert Gardens in the Abercromby area - started in

1979: it consisted of a group from a council

tenement block included in a demolition programme,

and some of their neighbours who had been rehoused


page 233

to newer council property in the area. The

membership of Weller Streets and Hesketh St came

from the tail end of the traditional slum

clearance programme - terraced street properties

that were beyond rehabilitation. From 1979, the

new co-ops came out of the council blocks -

'thirties tenements, 'fifties walk-ups, 'sixties

maisonettes. Some of the Prince Albert Gardens

members had been rehoused from the old tenement to

a block less than ten years old, built with high

aluminum cement.

The new co-ops faced two difficulties in

attracting finance. The new Conservative

government made an early decision that the Housing

Corporation should not fund "general family new

build." Even where this problem could be overcome,

the co-ops faced a prohibition on the Corporation

funding provision for the rehousing of council

tenants. In practice, a large proportion of

housing association lettings in Liverpool have


page 234

always been made to council tenants, since these

are a large source of "housing need" due to

physically degraded conditions. If a housing

association project was built for general needs,

and then let to council tenants, that was

acceptable; but if a scheme was built specifically

for this need group (as would happen if the same

tenants were to form a co-operative in order to

control the process of their own rehousing) that

was unacceptable.

These problems were resolved by a change

of control on the council. The 1980 local

elections were based on new ward boundaries with

every seat (rather than the normal one-third)

being fought. Liberals did particularly well in

inner city wards like Dingle and, most

spectacularly, Abercromby, expected to be a safe

Labour ward. Labour took 40 seats, the Liberals 38

and the Conservatives 21. The Liberals took

control of the council with Conservative support.


page 235

Co-operative housing appealed strongly to a number

of the radical Liberals who had won inner city

wards. There were two main strands in their

project: co-operative solutions within council

stock, and support for the already emerging new

build co-ops.

Within weeks of the election, on 12th June

1980 the full council considered a resolution in

the name of Chris Davies from Abercromby and

seconded by Richard Pine, in favour of co-

operatives on council estates. It was defeated and

a Conservative amendment to seek support from the

trade unions for such a proposal was also

defeated. A more cautious resolution, moved by the

Liberal leader Sir Trevor Jones and seconded by

Cyril Carr - two of the more right wing "old

guard" - was then carried.


page 236

Subsequent co-op business can be traced in

the minutes of the Housing and Building Committee

and its sub committees the main ones being:

Building; Estate Management; Allocations and

Services. At each of these, vast amounts of

routine business go through, usually unopposed,

covering the minutiae of tenders, disputed

allocations, Special Priority Medical Officer of

Health cases, weeding and cleaning of blocks and

so on. Opposed business finds its way to full

council, sometimes sitting on the agenda for two

or three meetings before being debated and

resolved.

On 25th June, the Building sub committee

approved a number of sites for build for sale

schemes, by a majority of 5-4. On 3rd June, the

full Housing committee amended this proposal so

that the site would now go to the Prince Albert

Gardens Co-op. This was carried 15-8, with Labour

opposition recorded. This resolution was opposed


page 237

business at full council in July. The opposition

to the site for the co-op was moved by the Labour

housing spokesperson, Ken Stewart, and seconded by

Tony Byrne, a newly elected councillor who later

emerged as the effective policy leader of Labour

in office (Parkinson, 1985:34).

Soon after the election, tenants in the

Dingle tenement blocks, with the support of their

newly elected local Liberal councillor Richard

Kemp, formed the Dingle Residents Co-operative.

Initially they planned a large project opened to

all tenement dwellers. However, when they were

offered a site for about 30 homes - enough for all

the founder members - they closed their

membership. Several more co-operatives later

formed within the tenements. The proposal to

allocate them a site came before Building

subcommittee on 10th September, opposed by Labour.


page 238

On 8th October 1980, a motion to support

co-operatives on council estates again came before

full council. Labour presented the following

amendment:

Councilsupports the establishment of co-operatives ... by small groups ofpeople who manage and control theproperties in which they live

is of the view that on municipalestates, schemes of participationin management are desirable, butthe responsibility and control ofallocations, maintenance andrepairs, must be retained by theLocal Authority

recognises that the contribution inthe production of units ofaccommodation that co-ops can makecan only be regarded asperipheral ...

requests the Director of Housing toreport on ways in which the cityCouncil can help small groups ofpeople who wish to establish co-ops, and the establishment oftenant participation schemes oncouncil estates.


page 239

This was defeated. At full council on 12th

November, Dingle co-op was opposed by Labour. At

Housing Committee on 27th November, the Liberals'

proposal on council estate management co-ops was

introduced. These could have taken over the

management (not ownership) of existing council

estates. This proposed the implementation of co-

ops wherever tenants wished, with 50% of

allocations of vacant homes being made by co-ops

to their own waiting lists and 50% to be chosen by

the co-ops from a council nominations pool. Co-ops

would control repairs. CDS and NHS, the two

agencies working in the housing association

sector, would be employed to carry out the work of

developing co-ops. This was carried at Housing

Committee on the chair's casting vote (one

Conservative was absent.)

On 17th December, two of the younger

radical Liberals (Richard Kemp and David Vasmer)

moved at full council that £22,500 be allocated to


page 240

CDS (only; NHS appear not to have put forward any

proposal) for co-op development on council estates

in 1981/2. This was referred to the Policy and

Finance committee. It came to the committee on

20th January, where it was defeated 16-9 with the

Conservatives voting against. The original motion

from Housing committee, to support management co-

operatives to control allocations and repairs on

estates, was debated at full council on 26th

February 1981 and was carried. So the Conservative

party supported the principle but not the payment

of outside agents to do the work. In the event

nothing came of the proposal, even though it was

now council policy.

New build co-ops now came forward from

field work carried out by MIH. On 11th March 1981,

Leta Claudia and Thirlmere co-ops were approved by

Building sub committee 6-5, with Labour opposing.

When Thirlmere came to full council on 13th May,

it was opposed by Labour with two amendments - the


page 241

first moved by Ken Stewart and seconded by Peter

Owens, the next by Eddie Loyden seconded by Tony

Byrne. Both amendments included this paragraph as

the main thrust:

the current policies being pursuedby the Liberal Party are nothingbut a smokescreen to hide the totalinadequacy of their provision ofhousing for need and theirinability to provide services forcouncil tenants.

At this point two events disrupted the

smooth progress of council business. One was the

first Toxteth riot, sparked off by the poor

relations between black youth and the police

before

the insurrection also spread tolocal whites, as the dispossessedof the inner city rose into a "poorpeople's revolt" against authority

(Parkinson, 1985:15).

The other was a typing dispute, which shut

down the business of most committees. For several

months an Emergency sub committee took the place


page 242

of most committees. Labour disapproved, and

accordingly nearly all Emergency sub committee

meetings were joined only by Conservative and

Liberal members, and most business was unopposed.

A third CDS new build co-op, Grafton

Crescent in Abercromby, was approved for funding

by the Emergency sub committee in July 1981. The

sub committee approved the 1982/3 Housing

Investment Programme with this statement:

It is the aim of the council thatpeople should have the greatestpossible control over the dwellingsin which they live, and to thisend, Housing Co-ops should beestablished wherever possible.

Emergency sub committee business could

still be opposed at full council, and support for

Thirlmere accordingly was debated at full council

on 23rd November 1981. An amendment was proposed

by Peter Owens and seconded by Tony Byrne: it

marks an interesting change of tack:


page 243

That the resolution of theEmergency sub committee be approvedand that this city council

(a) recognises that thecontribution in production of unitsof accommodation that co-ops canprovide can only be regarded asperipheral in meeting housing needon the scale required ...(b) believes that the currentpolicies on Co-operatives beingpursued by the Liberal Party, both"New Build" and on Council estates,are no more than a smokescreen tohid the total inadequacy of theirprovision ...(c) is appalled by the cynicalattitude of the Liberal Party tothe electorate ...

On 8th December 1981, land for Leta

Claudia was opposed by Labour in full council,

with a demand that the site go for municipal new

building instead. On 4th January 1982, land for

Prince Albert Gardens and Grafton co-ops came to

full council as opposed business. A first Labour

amendment, proposed by Stewart and seconded by

Owens, was the normal demand to allocate sites for


page 244

municipal building. But a second amendment, moved

by Owens and seconded by Byrne, contained exactly

the same formula as with the earlier amendment on

Thirlmere: to approve the co-op and recognise the

inadequacy of Liberal policy. This amendment, and

the revised resolution, were carried with

Conservative support! A similar pattern now

followed with Dingle: opposed in Housing

committee, it arrived at full council on 18th

February 1982 and Stewart and Owens moved the same

amendment to approve the support for the co-op

with a three point denunciation of Liberal housing

policy. This time the amendment was defeated.

On 10th March 1982, the Building sub

committee considered proposals from two more co-

ops in the Dingle area, Mill St and Shorefields,

to develop local derelict land owned by the

Merseyside Development Corporation. It was agreed

to support housing for rent to assist with

tenement rehousing, with a preference for housing


page 245

associations or co-ops, and to fund initial design

fees while asking for Housing Corporation support

for the capital works. Labour did not oppose this.

On 18th March, a proposal came to full Housing

committee to support co-ops in the Portland

Gardens rehousing in the Vauxhall area - the first

of the "Eldonian" developments. Labour opposed

this and favoured municipal development.

By this time Labour was focusing its

attention heavily around resolutions for the large

scale demolition of tenements - the walk up flat

blocks dating from the 1930s. A resolution at

Housing committee listed tenements to be

demolished (lost 12-11) with no mention of the

tenure of replacement housing. But from this point

on, Labour's position on co-ops was consistently

"anti"; resolutions to support a co-op but with an

anti-Liberal rider did not reappear. Indeed at

the committee on 18th March, Peter Owens proposed

a resolution to build municipal housing on the


page 246

Leta Claudia site, where the co-op had previously

been agreed: the co-op scheme was now well

advanced and near tender stage.

The main focus of attention now moved to

the tenement rehousing programme. At Building sub

committee on 2nd April, the Director of Housing

brought forward a report recommending 1,010

housing association units and 250 local authority

units of new building to support tenement

rehousing. The Liberals moved an amendment from

the chair, to delete all reference to council new

building and have all 1,260 units built by Housing

Associations. Labour proposed 3,532 municipal new

build homes. The Liberal version was carried.

On 29th April 1982, the Building sub

committee carried a resolution to finance the Mill

Street and Shorefields co-ops if (as was expected)


page 247

the Housing Corporation refused. Councillor Byrne

moved that the land be used for municipal housing.

By 3rd June, Labour was putting forward

proposals for 6,100 new homes under the tenement

demolition programme, but with no specified

landlord. On 2nd July 1982, this became a proposal

for 6,000 municipal dwellings. This was put to a

joint meeting of the Building and Allocations sub

committees, which instead agreed a programme of

new building to be undertaken by CDS, MIH and LHT,

together with some co-ops.

Labour however managed to gain

Conservative support for delays in decisions

pending studies of the impact of tenement

rehousing, with the proposed levels of newbuild,

on other need groups. By the end of 1982 the

Director was advising councillors that "a decision

on the future of the tenement rehousing programme


page 248

and the direction of the allocations policy is now

absolutely essential ..."

The tenement rehousing programme was to

provide an orderly, prioritised programme of new

building with the choice between a co-operative

and a conventionally rented home. Had the council

accepted the Director of Housing's modest proposal

for a small proportion of council houses, there

would have been a further choice of tenure. In the

event, four more co-operatives in the south end of

the city started to develop co-operatives with CDS

support, under the tenement rehousing programme.

In May 1983, Labour was returned to power

in the city with a majority. The centrepiece for

the housing and urban renewal programme became the

Urban Regeneration Strategy (URS). This

concentrated council investment on refurbishment

or demolition of council housing stock in


page 249

seventeen areas, with new building to complement

programmes to remove flats and create conventional

street layouts. The programme was initiated from

the Economic Development committee chaired by Tony

Byrne, and was managed by a central strategy unit

within the chief executive's department.

The council quickly announced a moratorium

on all further funding of housing co-ops except

where the council was contractually committed -

which meant that the co-ops had, at minimum,

exchanged contracts on land. This left six Local

Authority HAG funded new build co-ops to complete

their schemes - the two MIH co-ops in the north

end, three CDS co-ops in Abercromby ward, and one

in Dingle. These built about 170 homes together.

There was a greater number of co-ops which

had commenced design work on the basis of council

resolutions to grant funding, but had not yet


page 250

reached the stage of a "contractual commitment"

(the co-ops could not exchange contracts until an

outline design approval had been received from the

DoE). These included six CDS co-ops in the south

city wards developing about 220 units, and the

first Eldonian project at Portland Gardens in

Vauxhall, involving about 100 units. A new LHT co-

op project at Gerrard Gardens, also in Vauxhall,

represented another 100-unit plus scheme, had been

in existence for a matter of weeks and had not yet

received a council resolution to grant HAG.

A bitter public campaign followed. In

September 1982, the Architects Journal had carried an

enthusiastic account of the "Liverpool

breakthrough" describing how tenants had chosen

their architects and were controlling the design

of their homes (Wates, 1982). It received wide

attention locally and nationally. Now the Journal

reported demonstrations by co-op members under the

headline "Liverpool co-ops face Labour axe." Twice


page 251

describing co-ops as "highly successful", it added

that "Labour ward councillors showed support for

the housing co-ops during the election campaign".

(Architects Journal, 20th July 1983, p.29). The Liverpool

Echo (7th July 1983) carried a long report which

featured the "Liverpool Breakthrough" article and

the "disbelief" and "anger" felt by co-op members

who had designed their own homes, had disabled

children, and now saw their last chance to live in

a house with a garden disappearing.

The campaign was aimed especially at

building support from the Labour Party. The

chairman (sic) of the Merseyside housing co-

operatives, Ann Meadows from Luke Street co-op,

told the local press:

We have had guarantees of backingfrom many Labour parties and tradeunions and we just hope it'llpersuade the Labour group inLiverpool to see reason (Liverpool Echo5th October 1983)


page 252

The Labour MP for Bootle in Merseyside,

Allan Roberts (who was a Co-operative as well as a

Labour Party member), publicly "regretted very

much" the Liverpool council's position. He and the

Labour MP representing many of the co-operative

members, Bob Parry, were to "go over the heads of

the Liverpool councillors to get extra funds for

the co-ops." This referred to funding for the two

co-operatives, Mill street and Shorefields,

building 100 homes on Merseyside Development

Corporation land.

The council put forward a compromise. All

co-ops in this category, planning schemes on

council land, would proceed to build their schemes

as designed but as council housing. The pre-

allocated members would receive tenancies if they

qualified (as most did) under the council's

allocations policy. The co-ops' chosen architects

would be employed by the council. But there was no

compensation for the work put in by CDS or MIH,


page 253

representing tens of thousands of pounds loss for

these agencies. This compromise enabled the co-ops

to negotiate a high degree of control over their

developments, and to house most of their members.

An open letter to the Liverpool Housing

Chair, Ken Stewart, was published in the national

Labour Weekly (4th November 1983) under the heading

"Let us continue as housing co-ops." It was signed

by Portland Gardens, Dingle Mount, Friends and

Neighbours and Luke Street co-ops (the other

municipalised co-op, Kent Gardens, had a distinct

political history and did not identify with this

campaign) and said in part:

We openly acknowledge that yourcurrent offer to our co-ops goes along way towards adopting some ofthe principles of tenant controland, if you and your colleaguescannot be persuaded to accept us astrue housing co-operatives, we willhave little choice but to acceptyour proposals to "municipalise"us... We know from statements maderecently by your colleagueCouncillor Hatton that the LabourParty does support co-ops, and


page 254

indeed welcomed the fact that thegovernment's Housing Corporationhas agreed to finance two co-ops.

Municipalisation was, as the letter

pointed out, financially expensive for the city.

By developing rented homes through HAG, councils

could set the whole spending off against the

approved capital programme and receive a grant

from central government equivalent to the HAG

approved on the scheme (typically over 90%) of the

whole cost. This grant was a non-recyclable

capital receipt. But there was no ongoing revenue

cost to the city. With council housing, the

development cost was met by borrowing, repayable

from rents, rates and revenue (HRA) subsidy.

Furthermore, co-op homes were built to the

old, relatively large Parker Morris standards

(Local Authority HAG was the last sector to be

moved off Parker Morris). Council homes required a

Project Approval from the DoE on a "value for


page 255

money" assessment. This drove standards down to

private sector provision levels for homes. Co-op

designed homes were inevitably of a higher

standard than the council could provide. The

council agreed to meet the cost of the higher

standard, and the DoE agreed Project Approval in

these exceptional cases. To add further to the

costs, the council insisted on a grade 1 flue

(capable of taking an open coal fire) installed in

every house. This was an additional cost on the

scheme, over and above what would have been

accepted for HAG.

With the cost constraints removed, the

main problems remaining for these "municipalised"

co-ops to resolve were those presented by a

guidance note entitled "Urban Regeneration

Strategy new build development design layout

issues" agreed at a site visit in April 1984

involving Byrne, Stewart and URS officer Jill

Preston, together with a planner and two housing


page 256

managers. This agreed that layout should be

"generally conventional with through routes rather

cul-de-sacs" with "no clusters." There should be

"short streets" with "dwellings to face roads."

There should be a "conventional system of carriage

and pavement" with "no shared surface." External

spaces should include "solely private gardens and

pavements" with "no common areas; no play-spaces."

This rigid separation of all space into

private and public denied one of the most exciting

opportunities presented by co-op design, that of

defining precisely the "common" space which a

small community could manage and use. The price of

municipalisation was that communal spaces were

insistently eliminated, even where co-ops offered

to own and manage the spaces themselves.

Two co-operatives not developing municipal

land were funded by the Housing Corporation, using


page 257

the Merseyside Special Allocation created as part

of the housing programme support available through

the Merseyside Task Force, an interdepartmental

central Government office set up after the Toxteth

riots. Under Michael Heseltine - Environment

Secretary until shortly before the 1983 general

election - the Task Force had not shown interest

in co-ops. Now that co-ops were seen as the

victims of "Militant," Ministers arrived to

applaud and support them. The best known

beneficiaries were the Eldonian co-op, who built

their second major development (following the

municipalised Portland Gardens scheme) on the site

of the old Tate and Lyle sugar works (Cowan et al,

1988). Several smaller co-ops were later funded in

Liverpool, all on privately owned sites. CDS moved

the focus of its co-op development capacity to

Knowsley, the Metropolitan Borough neighbouring

Liverpool to the east. Seven new co-ops started in

Knowsley from 1984 to 1987, four of them funded by

the Housing Corporation, of which three used


page 258

Special Allocation and thus avoided the block on

mainstream HC funding of family rehousing for

council tenants (the other was exclusively for

pensioners).

In Liverpool, the city refused any support

for housing co-ops. The council's policy was in

principle not to oppose co-ops as long as they did

not divert resources from the city's own

strategies. In practice every available council

resource was deployed to prevent their developing.

In one case, tenants just outside an "Urban

Regeneration" area set up a co-op with a view to

renovating a block of flats and obtained an

initial indication of support from the Task Force.

They met councillors, including the chair of

Housing, who agreed that under the policy they

should be able to proceed with the support of the

council. But within a few days the boundary of the

regeneration area was altered, the block assigned

for demolition, the people rehoused and the


page 259

demolition carried out (Liverpool Daily Post, 24th

October 1984).

The council would not sell land to co-ops

and refused planning permission to the Eldonians

for the co-operative housing development on the

Tate and Lyle site. Labour Politicians insisted

they rejected the scheme only on planning grounds

(Liverpool Echo 25th March 1985) but most observers

thought it political (Wates, 1985; Observer 19th May

1985.) The Shelter magazine Roof saw the planning

decision as part of a "vicious campaign" by

Liverpool against the co-operatives (May/June

1985, p.7). By this time, Tony McGann, the leader

of the Eldonians, was the city's "citizen of the

year" (Liverpool Echo 30th March 1985).

Tony Byrne was quoted as being determined

to "smash" co-ops (Valatin, 1985). "Community," he

told Roger O'Hara, an active local Communist and


page 260

one of the promoters of Prince Albert Gardens

among other co-operative housing initiatives, "is

a bourgeois concept."

Politics and the aftermath

Co-operative housing became a deeply

political issue in Liverpool in the first half of

the 1980s. This section explores the political

motivations of the Labour Party, the other

participants in the controversy, and the co-ops

themselves; and the impact the Liverpool co-ops

had on opinion nationally.

The 1983 District Labour Party (DLP)

policy statement included the following statement:

CO-OPERATIVES - THE ILLUSIONThe District Labour Party hasdecided that the co-ops to beencouraged are those of smallgroups, either new build orconversion, who control theproperties in which they live. Co-ops should be regarded as analternative form of tenure and not


page 261

necessarily related to housingneed.

In Liverpool a small number of newbuild co-ops have been used as asmoke screen to hide thedestruction of a new build for renthousing programme. This is becausethe total finance necessary for anew build programme has beenexcluded from the HousingInvestment Programme. Theconsequence is that the TenementRehousing and Demolition Programmeis destroyed, and the vast majorityof tenants will be forced to existin out-dated and sub-standardaccommodation for the foreseeablefuture.

Experience has shown that peoplehave turned to these co-op ventureswhen it has become apparent thatthe new build municipal houses thatthey were promised would not beprovided. Under the guise of givingpeople what they want, a minorityachieve new-build housing, with themajority left in tenements.

This statement follows the line Labour had

taken in opposition. It gives the impression of

supporting co-ops in principle as a choice, but

only if they are small and do not meet need. It

implies that the availability of new housing for


page 262

ordinary renting would kill off the demand for co-

ops. A year later, the tone hardened. This is from

the DLP policy statement of 1984:

THE CO-OP ISSUE

The co-op issue has been the mostcontroversial one as far as housingis concerned. The question to beasked is:

a) Did co-ops in Liverpool start asa spontaneous desire by people foran alternative form of tenure whichis compatible with municipalhousing, or,

b) Were co-ops part of a deliberateand calculated attack on municipalhousing by the Tory Partynationally, aided and abetted bythe local Liberal/Tory alliance.

The Housing Sub Committee holds theview that the latter is the answerto the question. That is not to saythat individual families were ofthat mind but that was clearlygovernment's, both local andnational, intention. There is alsolittle doubt that the HousingAssociations and leading advocatesinvolved in the issue knew fullwell the consequences on public


page 263

housing of the policies beingpursued. The co-ops which have beenpart of the controversy were allformed since 1979.

The "leading advocates" included Labour

Party officers - among them George Howarth, then

deputy leader of Knowsley Council (and later a

minister in the Blair government) whom Tony Byrne

accused personally of "working for the Liberals" -

and members of the Labour or Communist Parties.

None was a Conservative or Liberal member. Housing

co-ops had been part of Labour Party housing

policy for a decade or more, and actively promoted

by the 1974/79 Labour Government. A claim thus

emerges that the Labour Party is heavily

infiltrated by agents of its Tory opponents,

consciously starting pro-Government co-ops as part

of their entryist goals. The assumption that co-

ops would wither on the vine in the face of a

municipal new build option had turned out to be

the real "illusion." Now the District Labour

Party's opposition to co-ops could only be


page 264

justified by a paranoid conspiracy theory of

Stalinist intensity.

What really lay behind this opposition?

One explanation is "Militant." To the Catholic-

based co-ops of the North End, the dispute over

co-ops came across as a struggle between

traditional Labour and Militant. When they visited

Glasgow, the sight of a non-Militant Labour

council actively promoting co-ops provided

evidence. (Thomas, 1990, pp. 56-7). In their own

ward, Paul Orr, a right-wing traditional Labour

councillor, had been a leading proponent of a co-

op solution to the need for local new building.

Militant's own account of its housing and urban

regeneration policy agrees that it

provoked some controversy andopposition from alleged"specialists." The Communist partypaper, the Morning Star (30thJanuary 1985), eagerly picked upthe verdict of Shelter onLiverpool's housing programme: "Arecipe for Disaster." The articlecomplained that there would be no


page 265

tenants' control, no housing co-operatives and no role for thevoluntary sector. The realobjection was that the programmewas based firmly in the publicsector. But the URS did allow forimprovements by home-owners,whether owner-occupiers orlandlords, with the support ofimprovement grants. It also allowedfor partnership with housingcorporations (sic) and localhousing associations to ensure co-ordinated use of resources.

Any opponents of the UrbanRegeneration Strategy werechampioned by the press. Thus, theproponents of housing co-ops foundtheir cause being supported notonly by the Echo and the Post, buteven the Daily Mail and the DailyExpress. The council's refusal togive extensive aid to some of theseco-ops was not at all based on any"doctrinaire" approach, but flowedfrom the understanding that, withvery limited resources, the firsttask was the designated priorityareas and to house people in thegreatest housing need. To havegiven housing co-ops the £6.5million being demanded would havemeant severely cutting thecouncil's housebuilding programme.Councillor Tony Hood, Chairman ofthe Development and BuildingControl Sub Committee, referring toone local case, declared in March1985: "The government was using the


page 266

people of Vauxhall to get atLabour's housing policies in thecity." The Vauxhall co-oporganisation had asked for £6.5mfrom the city council to financethe community group's housing co-opscheme. When it was turned down,the government stepped in toprovided the necessary finance. Onthe principle of "the enemy of myenemy is my friend," the Torieswere prepared to use any opponentof the city council, no matter howideologically opposed tothemselves. (Taaffe and Mulhearn, 1988, pp 160-

161)

This statement reflects the public line

from the Labour Party in this period: there was no

objection to co-ops, provided they did not draw

resources from the URS priorities. Clearly the

facts show otherwise: the city was willing to

spend additional money to provide groups with a

council rather than a co-op solution, and was

determined to prevent a choice of co-op being

available within URS priorities. Either Militant

was not willing to disclose the true policy, or

was not sufficiently aware of it to examine the


page 267

contradictions. Support for the latter possibility

is found in the text: it confuses "co-operatives"

and "corporations" and refers only to the well-

publicised dispute with the Eldonians (from

Vauxhall ward).

For the Militants, the Labour group was a

machine to be used: as Derek Hatton (1988:63) puts

it, "we knew who were our allies ... We knew who

we could and could not trust." Tony Byrne had

little in common with Derek Hatton except a

religious background and a conviction that housing

was a priority. He was one of the "right people"

selected by Militant to carry out its overall

design. He had a "grasp of economics .. second to

none." (65). Mulhearn, contrastingly, was among

those key Militants

who were purely political animals -who formed the backbone of ourthinking and policy-making - butwould never be great administrators... he simply did not adapt to theday to day running of theadministrative machine .. it was a


page 268

mistake to bring him on to thecouncil .. [as a non-councillor] heruled with an iron hand behind thescenes but was always able to claimthat he was distanced from us. (64)

It would be consistent with Hatton's

account for Mulhearn and Taaffe simply not to have

known enough detail to appreciate the true policy

towards co-ops. But it could also be that they

were maintaining a "deniable distance" from the

detail in order not to take responsibility for

decisions that were difficult to explain to

socialists, such as those influencing and reading

the Morning Star.

What is particularly interesting about the

Taaffe/Mulhearn extract is their depiction of the

co-ops as an "enemy" of the government to which

they were "ideologically opposed." This contrasts

sharply with the Byrne line reflected in District

Party statements: that co-ops were dreamed up by

the government in a deliberate effort to undermine


page 269

council housing. This is revealing. Militant saw

the co-ops as belonging in the same ideological

camp; the analysis that the government supported

them only on the principle that "my enemy's enemy

is my friend" is reasonable.

Militant had no particular gain to make

out of "smashing" co-ops. If Militant's basic

strategy was to accumulate followers and clients

within the Labour Party in preparation for its

eventual collapse, there was no reason why

Militant should not have made gains through co-

ops. If its aim was to build a broad working class

and urban alliance in support of high spending

public policies, the co-ops would have made

credible components of such an alliance. As it

turned out, making opponents of the co-ops divided

Militant's support on the Labour left, and

provided a positive outlet for politicians of all

persuasions, and for civil servants and the wider


page 270

housing policy community, to express their unease

at the council's authoritarianism.

In their belief that architectural form

provided the key to successful housing, Liverpool

Labour welcomed the support of the geographer

Alice Coleman, the author of Utopia on Trial, who

believed that social behaviour could be closely

aligned to the detail of housing design. Coleman

was a particular protégé of Margaret Thatcher:

I went further than the DoE inbelieving that the design ofestates was crucial to theirsuccess and to reducing the amountof crime. I was a great admirer ofthe work of Professor Alice Colemanin this area and I made her anadvisor to the DoE, to theirdismay. (Thatcher, 1993:605).Coleman herself gave enthusiastic and

unqualified support to Liverpool's policies:

Practically everything we haverecommended they are doing - not inpatches but the whole lot -Liverpool is the pioneer. (Guardian2nd December 1985)


page 271

Alice Coleman's endorsement of Liverpool's

housing design was important to Militant

activists. It is mentioned by Hatton (1988:61) and

by Taaffe and Mulhearn, highlighting Coleman's

quoted view that Liverpool had "got it right."

The achievements were hailed byhousing experts ... The Post (12thSeptember 1985) carried a headline:"House-proud city has got itright." It went on to state:"Liverpool's 3800 new homes, allwith front and back gardens, earnpraise from author AliceColeman"... She completelyconcurred with the main thrust ofthe URS ... She went on record assaying that she regarded theLiverpool efforts in urban housingas an example of the way theproblem should be tackled. (Taaffeand Mulhearn,1988:159).

Her support was prominently quoted in

propaganda: the Liverpool Labour News "Defend Our City

Stop Tory Lockout!" Crisis Issue, distributed to every

home in the city in 1985, gave great prominence to

her remarks.


page 272

The traditional, mainstream Labour Party

was not necessarily in support of the co-operative

critique of Liverpool housing policy. Lord

Underhill, a retired national official of the

Labour Party and a pillar of the traditional

right, wrote to the press in response to a

contribution by the then Liberal Party leader.

Underhill was "greatly incensed by David Steel's

criticism" of the Liverpool housing programme as

"faceless municipal socialism." On the contrary,

Liverpool was building "separate houses with

private gardens and off-street parking." (Guardian,

25th September 1985).

Underhill wrote again (Guardian, 10th

October 1985), stressing that "My views on

Militant are well-known" to add that he had been

to Liverpool on a trip organised by the

Association of Metropolitan Authorities and had

seen for himself the "tree planting, local parks

and sports centres" that provided evidence of a


page 273

wider perspective on urban regeneration than that

associated with traditional municipal planning. On

the same page, a letter from the late Ken Stewart,

the former housing Chairman and later a Member of

the European Parliament, said:

The housing policies of theLiverpool Labour Party are not thepolicies of the Militant Tendency:they are the collective policies ofthe Liverpool Labour movement.

Tony Byrne, the creator of the Urban

Regeneration Strategy, believed passionately in

demonstrating the adequacy of municipal provision

for the working class:

It has been argued by people whobasically want to destroy themunicipal housing service thatmunicipal housing has failed. As aparty we have never accepted that,identifying instead architecturaland planning failures, particularlyin the postwar years ... councilsdo have the capacity and resourcesto make fundamental impacts ... Ibelieve the working class isentitled to proper housing andenvironment


page 274

In response to a question about the

exclusion of "admirable co-operative housing" from

the programme:

Mr Byrne says that elements ofchoice have been built into theprogramme, both of style ofproperty and of the locality inwhich people can live

(Guardian 30th March 1985)

He disclaimed any other political

programme:

I can't see beyond the next generalelection, but if Thatcher's inagain local government will bereduced to nothing more than aquango

(Guardian 2nd December 1985)

So the URS was a final demonstration

project in the use of the municipal machine for

the comprehensive satisfaction of the physical

needs of the working class. It was not the main

intention to embarrass or defy the central

Government which would probably proceed unhindered

in its project of disabling local government. But


page 275

the adequacy of a municipal system, once the

architects and planners were properly controlled,

would be proved.

The scope for "choice" had been settled:

it was about style and location of dwelling.

Choice of style here meant a renovated council

home or a new one: council houses were built to a

standard pattern, instantly recognisable, unlike

the variety that makes co-op schemes distinctively

different from each other. Choice was not about

tenure or management. This had been settled before

the 1983 election. From the resolutions tabled by

Labour councillors, including Byrne, in 1981 and

early 1982, there seems to have been some

agonising about this: some willingness to consider

co-ops as a choice within a predominantly

municipal range of options. Certainly many Labour

councillors had been willing to assure the co-

operative lobby that this was, in fact the case:


page 276

"We wouldn't oppose co-ops if we had a municipal

programme. You know the game."

But choice could only be possible if it

did not involve control over the key council

management functions of lettings and repairs. It

could only be allowed if it resulted in "small"

organisations - never defined, but clearly the

rolling programme of a few hundred homes, in

groups of twenty homes upwards, that started to

emerge in 1982 was becoming much too large. Even

more curiously, for co-ops to be permitted they

would “be regarded as an alternative form of

tenure and not necessarily related to housing

need.” What can have been meant by this statement?

Liverpool Labour councillors were not isolated

from the wider policies of the municipal left.

Derek Hatton had been a housing association

chairman and squatter activist in London; Tony

Byrne an activist with the national Campaign for

the Homeless And Rootless. The image these Labour


page 277

politicians had of co-operative housing may be

illuminated by the type of co-op supported by

progressive left-wing councillors in London, where

seven adults from the ParanoidAadvark-Gay Co-op were allocatedthree council properties

and another wrote a letter:

"Dear Co-ops section, "Please find enclosed ourapplication. Sorry it's not typedbut we had technical problems (ourtypewriter's about fifty yearsold)."

This "co-op" consisted of ninewhite people between the ages of 19and 25 who included among theirnumber a former quantity surveyorwith Camden council, a nurse, anLEA teacher and a trainee barrister... they were duly allocated twohouses

(Sunday Times, 13th May 1984)

Bizarre as it may seem, it is the Paranoid

Aadvark-Gay type of Co-op that best approximates

to the model of co-operation favoured by the

Liverpool Labour Party as implied in its


page 278

statements, and this would not have seemed

unreasonable to a mainstream, left wing Labour

councillor familiar with policies in forward-

looking London boroughs. It was an "alternative,"

something "not related to need." It involved the

sharing of homes and lifestyle - it was, in terms

of consumption practice, "communitarian." It was

not a means of delivering the consumption benefits

associated with modern, self contained family

houses with gardens: this was the function of the

municipality.

What about the Liberals? As the "in-joke"

went, "the Liberals had only one housing strategy

- to build houses for sale in Labour wards and

houses for rent in Tory wards" (Parkinson,

1985:21). It was a "joke" that Liberal housing

experts liked to tell to explain their relations

with their leader. Did the Liberals expect their

co-op policy to gain votes in inner city wards?

Had it worked it would have succeeded in


page 279

exploiting Labour's "Achilles’ heel" of housing

policy (Parkinson, 1985 p.20) and building a new

base for Liberals among tenement dwellers and

Catholics in the inner city. But there is no

evidence that co-op membership inclined people to

vote Liberal. Several housing co-operative members

went on to become Labour councillors - including

Phil Hughes and Peter Tyrell from Weller Streets,

Margaret Clark and John Livingstone from the

Eldonians (although Margaret Clark had left the

co-op before becoming a council politician; Hughes

and Clark became Chairs of Housing in Liverpool)

and Marie McGiveron from Vauxhall. Frank Carroll

from Prince Albert Gardens was a regular Communist

Party Council candidate. Among several local co-op

housing professionals in Labour Party membership

was George Howarth, a senior Knowsley councillor

and later a Labour MP and government minister.

Confronted with Labour opposition, the Eldonians

organised themselves to take over the local Labour

ward (Cowan et al, 1988:42). No link was ever


page 280

established between the co-operative housing

movement and the Liberal Party, even though co-op

workers and members worked closely with the pro-

co-op Liberal councillors for years. The co-

operatives and their professionals identified

themselves with a socialist tradition, with its

roots in the idea of the dignity and autonomy of

the working class - whether this was expressed as

the Weller Streets wanting to "smack 'em" or in

the words of the chair of the Prince Albert

Gardens Co-op, Joe Murphy, on the CDS Video

Liverpool Pioneers (1984):

This co-op, just this one littleco-op, proves that we workingpeople can, and will, run our ownlives, our own houses, if given thechance.

When the Eldonians produced a leaflet to

guide other groups who wanted to emulate them, it

included advice on

How to influence the council


page 281

1. Join the Ward Party

... we all support Labour, and ourco-op was the very essence ofsocialism (Eldonians, 1984).

The New Statesman complained on 7th December

1984 that "every party, except Labour, wants to be

seen to support co-ops" suggesting that "Mr

Kinnock will not support the co-ops publicly"

because "he doesn't want to offend ... Labour's

Militant caucus." Jack Straw, it went on, was "the

only front-bench Labour spokesman to support" the

Liverpool and other housing co-ops, which the

writer saw as an example of "Labour's brightest

policies being pilfered by the other parties."

Neil Kinnock did in fact then support the co-ops

and the new Labour housing spokesperson, Jeff

Rooker, visited the Liverpool co-ops in 1985

(Liverpool Echo, 7th June 1985). Following this,

Labour adopted a policy strongly favourable to

choice in housing and a 1985 party policy


page 282

discussion paper to the National Executive

Committee said

successful experiments in Glasgowand Liverpool show that co-operatives can be part ofgenerating confidence in inner cityareas. They have enabled tenants tobe closely involved in the designof their homes.

Meanwhile, the housing press continued to

feature the success of the co-operatives. The

Shelter magazine "Roof" ran highly critical

editorials on Liverpool housing policy in

September/October 1984 and January/February 1985,

and a five page article on the co-ops:

the small numbers disguise theirimportance in showing Liverpooltenants that there is a realalternative to Corpy (Council)housing - that working people cancontrol their own housing.(Grosskurth, 1985, p.21)

Voluntary Housing, the magazine of the

National Federation of Housing Associations,

featured the co-ops in these terms: “The most


page 283

dramatic flowering of community architecture has

been in Liverpool” (Wolk, 1985, p.19)

Visitors to the Liverpool Co-operatives in

1985 included HRH Prince Charles who wrote that he

had been "electrified" by the experience (The Times,

27th February 1985) and Margaret Thatcher.

Catherine Meredith, the director of CDS, was

awarded an MBE soon after.

The Liverpool Co-operatives' impact on

Labour housing policy nationally - and on housing

policy generally - was felt in the House of

Commons on 4th February 1986, when the House

debated the second reading of the Housing and

Planning Bill. Labour proposed that tenants should

have the right to take over the management of

council estates. There was one dissenting voice on

the Labour benches: the late Eric Heffer, the

Liverpool MP who walked out of the 1985 Labour


page 284

Party conference at which Neil Kinnock distanced

the Party from its Militant Liverpool council.

Heffer said:

Some of my hon. friends seemmesmerised by the word "Choice." Ihope they will not remainmesmerised by it, because mostworking people have no choice. Theydo not begin to think in terms ofmaking choice. They cannot say, "Iwill buy a house" or "I will rent ahouse or go into a local co-op orhousing association." Their onlypossible choice is that the localauthority might offer themaccommodation and allow them toturn down at least one offer.

(Hansard, vol. 91, col. 201).

Labour opposition to the co-ops reflected

a deeply held sense that what the co-ops were

demanding - substantial new build housing

programmes for people in need - was something that

councils ought to provide. The idea the tenants

could direct this provision for themselves was one

that many Labour politicians found deeply

threatening. The politicians who felt this way


page 285

were not reactionary municipal power-brokers, nor

were they ideological militants with a grand plan

to lead a revolution. They were skilled,

instinctive socialist politicians whose strategy

commanded respect and support from traditional

Labour stalwarts as well as from a prominent

housing researcher close to the Conservative prime

minister.

There was a stubborn hermeneutic about

their analysis. Co-ops cannot meet need on the

scale required, so if they exist they cannot meet

need, so if they meet need they should not exist.

Co-ops cannot build on the scale required, so if

they exist they should be small, so if they are

big they should not exist. Perhaps most stubbornly

recited of all was: working people have very

little choice, so people who have choice cannot be

working people.


page 286

Labour wanted to preserve municipal

monopoly in providing for existing council

tenants. The idea of choice was not so much

unacceptable as incomprehensible - logically

incompatible with its mission. Co-operatives

belonged to a different world, to people not in

need. They were not for the working class. They

were not a choice, but an "alternative."

The Liberals also did not offer choice,

since their programme excluded the choice that

many, probably most, people wanted: a new council

house. Even a modest programme of municipal

housing, a fifth or so of the total new build

programme, the least the Director of Housing could

reasonably propose, was too much. There was to be

no council house built for general family need

under the tenement rehousing programme. A house

could be renovated, if necessary by rebuilding

from the foundations upwards. The council could

build new for "special" need. But a family that


page 287

wanted a new house would have to go to a co-op, or

to a housing association.

Neither the Labour nor the Liberal

politicians seem to have had a political agenda in

relation to the co-operatives, if by that is meant

a strategy for maintaining and extending the power

of their party or their own power within the

party. It would have been easy and beneficial for

Labour to concede some ground to the co-ops, but

it would have interfered with the execution of the

regeneration strategy. The Liberals gained nothing

politically by building co-ops in inner city wards

for loyal socialists. The housing policies

reflected the powerfully held convictions of

individuals who did not have a long term agenda

within Liverpool politics. Tony Byrne appears to

have had no personal ambitions at all, and Chris

Davies moved on to the greener pastures of

Saddleworth.


page 288

The pioneering new build co-ops - Weller

Streets and the Eldonians - had to break new

political ground to get what they wanted. They

combined a brutally determined leadership with the

political instincts found quite widely around the

co-ops - instinctive socialism, deep class

consciousness, an element of utopianism, a self

image of heroic self help, a readiness to work

inside or outside the system according to which

would get the best results. They worked

successfully with a range of professional agents,

hiring and firing until they found the ones they

wanted. They wanted good quality: no one from

these co-ops could conceivably have written a

letter to the council to say their typewriter was

broken. They got outstanding design in their

houses because they wanted, and respected, quality

work. Their political campaigning reflected the

same values and ambitions. They could "mix it"

with politicians and royalty at every level.


page 289

The co-ops had a significant impact on

policy: notably in moving Labour housing policy

forward, nationally and later locally, and

redefining the possibilities for community

involvement in architecture and housing

development. After the 1988 Housing Act, it became

virtually impossible for Co-operatives to develop

on the “Weller streets model,” since the Housing

Corporation wanted to put new housing investment

through established housing associations able to

lever in private finance secured on a base of

existing stock that could also produce rent

surpluses. New co-ops have continued to develop as

“partners” of established associations, and have

often selected partner associations, architects

and others. The approach to tenant participation

in design pioneered in the co-ops is now widely

established in mainstream new development in

Merseyside. However, it relies on pre-allocation

of members to developments up to two years before

completion. Most new building nationally still


page 290

operates on the basis that tenants are selected

from the top of waiting lists only weeks before

completion, and many local authorities continue to

regard any earlier “pre-allocation” as violating

the principle that housing should be let to the

person in most need at the time that it becomes

available for letting. Consequently there is no

opportunity for pre-allocation, for tenant

involvement in design or for community development

prior to occupation, so social and environmental

decline afflicts some estates within a few years

of their completion (Page, 1993).

Conclusion to chapter 5: choice, participation and

empowerment

In Liverpool between 1977 and 1983, a

market was created that enabled prospective

tenants to form co-ops, choose architects,

building sites and service agencies. This was an

“accident” in the sense that no agency “willed”

the creation of this way of developing social


page 291

housing. It was the result of the collision of the

forces that met around the theme of relaunching

co-operative housing in the 1970s: Campbell and

CDS; the Housing Corporation; radical urban

reformers; a government keen to put money into co-

operatives. Had there not been radically minded

urban reformers there would have been no NHS and

no locally rooted co-operative movement, but the

founders of NHS were primarily interested in

building careers and created captive clients whose

demands would be reliably limited to what NHS was

prepared to supply. Had the Housing Corporation

not taken the bizarre decision to impose CDS/CPL,

NHS might have become established as the accepted

monopoly provider of “secondary” services to co-

ops. As it turned out, when CDS Liverpool tore

itself free of the entanglements with CPL and NHS,

it had a cultural antipathy to in-house architects

(which CDS Liverpool never employed) and to co-op

members creating jobs for themselves in their


page 292

service agencies. The new agency was comfortable

with competition for co-op business.

The Liverpool case provides strong

evidence for the hypothesis that a service

provider market is not incompatible with a high

degree of participation in welfare services. The

co-ops attracted high levels of participation,

with large proportions of prospective tenants

taking part in design and other meetings over many

years (one recent co-op in a slum-clearance area

Liverpool is now completed nine years after co-op

members first formed it, and over five years after

they started work on design). The Campbell report

(DoE 1975), and Hands (1975:129), both regarded it

as beyond the tenacity or ability of co-operative

members to participate in the full process of

designing new homes. After moving into their

homes, 80% of members continue to attend meetings.

36% consider “participation” to be a benefit of

co-operative membership, about twice the national


page 293

average (Walker, 1991) (“Participation” remains of

course a cost, as considered in chapter 3. Because

it produces benefits, a large minority of

Liverpool co-op members learn to regard it as a

benefit in itself.) There can be little doubt

that participation was facilitated by competition.

Competition encouraged architects to develop

techniques to service participation, and to commit

the additional time to involving tenants, none of

which receives additional reward over and above

the normal design fees. Competition also created a

situation where other housing associations

developed the techniques and commitment to sustain

participation by prospective tenants.

One of the benefits of a market is

innovation (Estrin and le Grand, 1989). The

unregulated interaction of user wants and supplier

creativity generates solutions that are not pre-

planned. Those guiding the co-op revival, such as

Harold Campbell and John Hands, did not imagine a


page 294

situation where large numbers of inner city slum

clearance families would participate in creating

new-build co-operatives from scratch, even though

the “ultimate in planned growth of a housing co-

operative ... lies in new buildings” (Hands,

1975:129). The development and growth of this

innovation were facilitated very largely through

competition between service agencies and

architects.

One often stated objection to markets is

that they allocate according to the users’ ability

to pay. But there is no reason why the resources

allocated by the state cannot be set aside in

dedicated budgets for users to control. Co-ops did

not spend their own money on fees for architects

and service agencies: they spent HAG. Their fixed

budgets, in a competitive market, encouraged

architects to devote additional resources to the

projects.


page 295

Choice was however restricted in many

ways. 60% of those joining co-ops had considered

that they had no choice of any other form of

tenure than the co-operative, since most of the

Liverpool co-ops developed when this was the only

rehousing route that the Liberal council was

prepared to fund. A council home had been an

available choice for the rest, but not a new one.

Hardly anyone had a choice between co-ops. Had the

Liberal plan for tenement rehousing proceeded

(instead of being delayed in committee and then

lost in the 1983 election) tenants would have been

able to choose between a co-op and a conventional

HA home. As it was all the authorities had a

restricted view of what could be offered to

tenants. The Liberals would not offer, on

principle, any choice of a new council home - even

the modest programme suggested by the Director of

Housing was rejected in favour of a 100% HAG-

funded new build solution. The Labour Party was

opposed to any choice other than a council home.


page 296

The Housing Corporation, as the arm of central

government, attempted to impose a clearly

unsuitable architect on the Liverpool co-ops up to

1977, and operated funding restrictions that would

have prevented most “general need” co-operative

members from becoming involved early in the design

process.

The Labour Party’s position on co-ops was,

from the evidence we have seen, probably not

grounded in Militant analysis or marxist doctrine.

It was certainly not based on political

pragmatism. It seems most likely that the Labour

Party position was that expressed in principle by

Councillor Tony Byrne: that it was local

government’s job to meet housing need; that choice

was appropriate for those who were not in need but

that those who looked to the state should receive

a strictly defined, consistent and state-planned

allocation; and that the problem with earlier

generations of council housing was not lack of


page 297

tenant involvement or choice, but gratuitous

incompetence on the part of the authorities. It is

clear that he expected the demand for tenant

empowerment to disappear once the council started

building semi-detached houses, and that he was

shocked and affronted when it did not, a situation

he could understand only as a political conspiracy

led by opponents in the Party. His determination

and ability were backed by a clear vision of the

duties of government. This vision was,

essentially, the vision of Marshall: a set of

social rights to be met by professionally-mediated

allocation of goods and services determined by the

state, to users who were powerless, and who, like

Oliver Twist, would only ask for more. The

Liberals, likewise, had a fixed position that new

housing had to be provided by the housing

association sector. At the leadership level this

appears to have been founded on a narrow analysis

of the financial effects on the city budget and an

assumption that, once out of council estates,


page 298

people would be likely to vote Liberal. Co-

operative housing policy was driven along by

younger, more radical councillors who represented

the newly-won inner city wards. To get their

programmes implemented they worked closely with

the Labour Party (such as George Howarth) members

working for CDS and other agencies, and were aware

that Liberal votes from inner city co-ops would be

few: indeed that the daily grind and frustration

of council housing would offer richer pickings for

Liberals. It seems likely that the radical

Liberals were committed to participation as the

best way for people to exercise control over their

lives, and were prepared therefore, for as long as

the policy could be defended, to deny any other

choice to people wanting the benefit of a new

home.

There is no doubt that the “Weller Way”

model and its subsequent spread constituted a huge

extension of empowerment to welfare service users,


page 299

and that the shape of the urban environment was,

in small but significant pockets, transformed as a

result. The consequences for national housing

policy were substantial. It is also clear that in

this case, choice and innovation through the

market complemented and supported high levels of

participation. But “empowerment” was also limited

by the restricted choices imposed by the competing

political visions: first one that gave no choice

of anything other than co-operatives, and then one

that imposed only the council solution.

Significant “empowerment” could have been achieved

had users had a choice of similar resources

available through a range of co-op and non-co-op

providers - something that could, technically,

easily have been achieved.


page 300

Chapter 6

Conclusion: researching the empowered

social citizen

This thesis took as its research problem

the question of whether, as several writers

assumed, empowering users of social welfare

services as "consumers" conflicted with the

development of citizenship. The discussion of the

problem defended the construction of the citizen

as a bearer of social rights, and argued that

current conditions are adding a "right to

empowerment" for users of services exercising

their citizenship rights. A discussion of power

showed that empowerment would be a process of

change during which users developed relationships

and gained in their ability to change a course of

events, direct or alter the operations of other

actors and control meaning. We framed a hypothesis

with weaker and stronger versions. We selected a

case study of the recent history of co-operative


page 301

housing, specifically the new-build co-operative

movement in Liverpool in the late 1970s and early

1980s, to test the hypothesis.

The study has shown that, in this case,

the tenants who joined housing co-operatives were

able to alter the course of events both in

designing housing estates in ways different than

would have occurred otherwise, and in ways that

reflected their known wishes. In many cases they

provided homes that would not otherwise have been

provided for them. They were able to direct the

work of other actors (such as architects, housing

associations and council officers). In so doing

they developed relationships between groups of

members who enrolled in the co-operatives making

them effective as agencies; and developed

relationships with other agencies (such as housing

associations) who were authorised by this agency

relationship to act on behalf of and within limits

set by the user groups. The success of the


page 302

projects conveyed a meaning about the ability of

non-experts on a voluntary basis to control their

own lives and their own environments successfully.

On this basis, the case study provides an example

of empowerment.

The groups formed voluntary, democratic

organisations which successfully presented claims

for their members to be treated as having social

rights to housing which their current

accommodation did not satisfy.. Members'

entitlement to housing was based on need and

members paid rents based on public policy and not

related to cost in any substantial way. The

opportunity to join co-operatives was open,

subject to the constraints of varying public

policy, to everyone with the needs equivalent to

those who pressed the claim. On this basis, the

case presents an example of the meeting of the

social rights of citizens, organising themselves

in civil society.


page 303

The presence of a choice of suppliers of

services - especially architects and housing

service organisations - was part of this process

and it was, in this case, essential to it. The co-

operative design process was highly participatory

and this element was also facilitated by the

competitive market for services. The process was

innovative. The market relationship between user

groups and service providers generated methods for

meting users' social rights that had not previous

been envisaged, even though the political climate

was favourable to co-operative housing.

The case study, on this argument, has

demonstrated a case of citizen empowerment in

which consumer empowerment was essential and which

facilitated, and did not preclude, participation.


page 304

It has thus falsified the claim either

that consumer and citizen empowerment, or that

consumer empowerment and participation, are

necessarily in conflict and present alternative

strategies for developing citizenship. It has

proved that a combination of these is possible.

It has not proved (or demonstrated) the

stronger version of the hypothesis, that such

combinations are necessary to empowerment. Such

demonstration would require a much wider empirical

base. The thesis can therefore be read as a plea

for research design models that do not seek to

bias "citizen" empowerment to one particular type

of empowerment. The thesis has argued that

consumer and customer empowerment, and

participation, are conceptually different, and

that participation is an act of individuals within

groups rather than of groups as such. Further

research should be based on this analysis. Such


page 305

research could proceed from historical case

studies, observation, surveys and experiment.

The case study has provided confirmation,

in this case, that poitically-led models of the

role of users have a strong influence on the range

of choices open to users. In the case study, the

options for users were restricted by different

models in use by political parties and sections

within parties. Further work would help to confirm

whether this is the case more generally.

The growth of interest in citizenship is

accompanied, at the policy level, by great

interest in user empowerment and willingness by

government to invest in developing empowerment and

in capital projects that incorporate user

empowerment. The discussion in the early part of

this thesis would suggest that this interest is

motivated partly by concern over the quality of


page 306

provision, and partly over a project to develop

"civil society." There is likely therefore to be a

developing demand for more sophisticated models of

the "empowered social citizen." This thesis has

argued that empowerment may proceed through

participation, consumer choice and customer

rights, and that participation and consumer

empowerment are not in conflict. Models should

therefore accommodate all possible methods of

empowerment as part of a range of choices open to

users individually and in groups in users. The

empowered social citizen may thus be researched,

constructed and equipped.


page 307

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Citizenship and consumption with reference to the Liverpool newbuild housing cooperative movement

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Transcript of Citizenship and consumption with reference to the Liverpool newbuild housing cooperative movement