Local councils hate gobby, pushy pressure groups. This is because local councils hate being held to account for their failings and having the truth about how they operate being told to all and sundry. The same applies to pretty much most housing associations who have forgotten their roots and have morphed into vast, unaccountable corporate entities.

Local councillors and housing associations will come up with any convenient excuse they can to avoid having to deal with a grassroots, community based pressure group. This is simply because they will not deal with any group they can’t exercise a degree of control over. This leaves your gobby, pushy pressure group with a dilemma. Do they continue to operate in a way that maintains their independence giving councils and housing associations an excuse to continue to ignore them or do they go down the route of forming a properly constituted residents association that will get a degree of recognition from the authorities?

A word of warning… As soon as you have started to move your gobby, pushy pressure group towards a properly constituted residents association, you’re being sucked into their system. Why else would a local authority freely publish a template constitution for a residents association if they didn’t think they are the kind of groups they can co-opt? Take a look at this example and see what you think – www.highland.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/3145/sample_constitution.pdf Think of the amount of time that will have have be spent on discussing procedural points in a formally constituted residents association instead of what could be done to challenge the authorities by a more nimble, flexible and responsive pressure group.

When your ward councillor suggests that forming a residents association is the only way that the authorities will listen to and work with you, alarm bells need to start ringing very loudly. When a councillor suggests such a format, what they’re trying to do is nudge you towards forming something they can put constraints upon and exercise a degree of influence over. What they’re also trying to do is get you to work with a system of local governance that exists to deliver the government’s austerity agenda. Not only that, they’re trying to get you to work with a system that we all know from bitter experience is dysfunctional and broken. Read the latest print edition of the Stirrer to see what we mean – https://www.dropbox.com/s/x5ixljqiomcwkx5/STIRRER_No_2.pdf?dl=0

Obviously, even a gobby, pushy pressure group has to have some kind of structure in place to ensure that decision making is based on consensus and that it’s not dominated by a small cabal of activists. The point is, there are many ways of achieving this that fall outside the template of a residents association that’s favoured by the authorities. Seeds for Change has a lot of useful information on setting up and running grassroots groups that can offer them the autonomy they need to offer the alternatives / resistance to the shite that comes from local councils and housing associations – https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/

So, if you’re a gobby, pushy grassroots group that’s finding itself getting nudged by your local councillors into forming a formally constituted residents association, resist that pressure. If your group is about empowering your local community to start running its own affairs, why would you want to be sucked into to working with a system of local governance that’s dysfunctional and broken and whose agenda is about control rather than serving the people?