By Rob Gershon, council tenant and HQN associate

I didn’t join LinkedIn to find work. I do enjoy being contrary, sometimes, in order to help start conversations or try and get different points of view across or sometimes because people are just wrong about things.

I joined because a few people I know from a decade and a bit of swimming in the housing seas said that it was where some of the conversations about housing policy and rebalancing power between tenants and landlords were happening. With Twitter/X being essentially lost to extremist humans and extremist AI, Bluesky being an alternative platform where established voices agree with each other and people do not like jokes or criticism, proliferating tenant activism has a harder time of it now than it has for a while.

After what was a tumultuous year for me personally, I was therefore pleased to discover a – slightly corporate – world of discussions about high policy, hot housing topics and even tenant power on LinkedIn. Yes, half of the posts might be trying to sell you something, but I’ve spent my whole life muting the TV whenever adverts come on, so I am equipped to filter this out.

The long and the short of it is I’ve ended up doing some paid work alongside one of the groups trying to form a national tenant body. The project is going to build on the ‘Tenants At The Table’ report, covered here at HQN in July 2025. The aim being to form a national alliance for tenants in England to influence the debate, and policy on housing issues at regional and national levels.

The group doesn’t have a formal name yet, and this is one of the things the project seeks to change after getting wider input from social tenants. At this very moment, and until 10 April 2026, social housing tenants in England, whoever their landlords, are invited to apply to come along to a meeting in Stoke-on-Trent on the 23 April to discuss and inform what shape a national tenant body should actually take. There will be an additional virtual meeting for people unable to make it on the day, scheduled for 7 May 2026 as you’ll see in the details below.

I’ve personally been involved in some – but far from all – the discussions about a national tenant body that are live at the moment. It feels like various bits of government and landlord housing bodies have realised they can’t provide an unmediated tenant perspective and will struggle to legitimately operate a great deal of policy and practice without one.

There are a few initiatives going around to try and establish a tenant body and what has struck me is how similar the desired outcomes are. This is not surprising. To me it feels like there’s a lot of consensus about what a tenant body should be for and where it should operate; in and amongst communities, but also alongside landlord bodies, the ombudsman, regulator and MHCLG.

If you’re a tenant, you might agree with this. You might disagree with this, and both of these positions are why you should try and make it to Stoke on 23 April. It is my personal opinion that there’s no perfect model for a tenant body, but that shouldn’t stop us as tenants and residents trying to fashion something that can act on the things we agree about to address the stark imbalance in the focus currently given to what tenants want from government policy and the wider housing sector.

Here are the full details about the sessions:

INVITATION TO REGISTER INTEREST

Do you want to help develop a tenant-led National Tenant Alliance to give tenants of social housing a credible voice with policy makers?

How can I get involved?

A National Tenant Alliance (NTA) is being built as an inclusive and diverse alliance that offers a route for any tenant of social housing to be able to have a voice at national or regional level. To achieve that, it needs to be led by tenants of social housing who are broadly representative of the social housing tenant population.

If you like the sound of the NTA initiative, then you are warmly invited to attend one of two ‘Shaping Workshops’

  • In-person: Thursday 23 April 2026 in Stoke-on-Trent, 10.30 to 3.30pm – up to 60 places
  • Online: Thursday 7 May 2026 from 1-3pm – unlimited places

Travel costs will be covered for those who attend the in-person workshop.

The workshops provide an opportunity to:

  • Understand more about the initiative
  • Help to shape the NTA at this early stage of its development
  • Provide insights that will help estimate the cost of running NTA, to support bids for funding
  • Learn more about ways you could get involved in NTA going forward

For more information: please download a briefing document here.

To register your interest: Please email [email protected] saying which workshop you would like to attend by: 

 Friday 17 April 2026 – for the in-person workshop 

Tuesday 5 May – for the online workshop

Language translation skills: If you have any language translation skills that we could draw on to support participants, please let Stephanie know.