Give community housing a home in the law

Across the country, people are paying more and more for housing – but with less security, less stability, and less say over the place they live.

You can rent from a landlord. You can try to buy on your own. But there’s another option that barely gets mentioned:

You can be a member of a housing co-op, where homes are owned and run by the people who live in them.

It could be a block of flats, a group of houses on a street, or even an entire estate. The key difference is that the people who live there are also the ones who make the decisions: setting rents, organising maintenance, and deciding how the housing is managed.

That means no distant landlord setting the rules or extracting profit. Instead, the people who live there have a direct say over their homes and their community.

Co-operative housing already exists all over the UK.

But here’s the problem: housing law doesn’t properly recognise housing co-operatives.

“Tenure” is the legal term for the right you have to live in your home and whether that comes from, for example, owning it or renting it. But unlike other countries, England doesn’t have a “co-operative housing tenure” in law.

This means that housing co-ops have to squeeze into legal structures that weren’t built for them – making them harder to set up, harder to grow, and harder for people to access.

At a time when the housing crisis is getting worse, that’s holding back a solution we already know works. We want to change that.

We’re calling for co-operative housing to be properly recognised and supported in the law, so more people can have a real say over their homes.

If you agree, add your name today.