With the ODPM's Communities Plan, the Government takes another look into the future for public housing. Yet the people with the biggest stake in all this, those of us who live in affordable housing, are once again being excluded from the decision-making structures being set up and our views expressed in the consultation leading to the plan have been ignored.

Many parts of the country have strong tenants' organisations. Tenants Associations and Federations are forums where residents discuss and form views on the big issues as well as bread and butter concerns. Many tenant activists are committed people with a deeper understanding of the needs of their communities than professionals who, however professional, remain outsiders. Listening to the voice of tenants is not just democratic 'good practice', it taps in to a valuable source of knowledge without which the grandest designs often fail.

Indeed this is exactly what government says it is keen to do. In July 2002, Junior Housing Minister, Tony McNulty said in a speech to the Northern Housing Consortium 'I want all tenants to have genuine opportunities to be involved in decision making about their homes and neighbourhoods'. He added 'I want to leave you with no doubt of my commitment to tenant participation.'

In London at the moment, the tenants' movement is on a roll. Groups across London recently joined together to form the London Tenants Federation. Our aim is to be a strong voice for council tenants across the capital. Our constitution brings together, in a federal structure, borough wide tenants' federations and representatives from authorities without such organisations. In August last year the London Housing Unit gave funding for a part-time support worker to get the ball rolling. In January representatives from 17 boroughs attended the formal launch.

Weaknesses in involving tenants in decision-making generally have been acknowledged by the Government. The previous Housing Minister Lord Falconer commented that 'Tenants don't have a sufficiently direct voice with policy makers'. Research carried out into tenant participation confirms weaknesses in participation in decision making in both local authorities and housing associations. Research carried out by the Audit Commission entitled Group Dynamics found that the trend towards group structures by housing associations was moving tenants further away from involvement in decision making, as they were only involved on subsidiary boards and not the main board. Sheffield Hallam University found a similar situation in its study carried out in 2000, which highlighted that only a few councils had a comprehensive approach to tenant participation. Only a few were judged to have established adequate monitoring, evaluation and review techniques of their tenant participation performance.

Whilst many tenants organisations rightly complain that their borough's 'Tenant Participation Compacts' looks great on paper but are not carried out in practice, they are nonetheless an acknowledgement by government of the importance of tenants input at a local level. The government has also promoted projects like the New Deal for Communities, which recognise that successful regeneration, must be 'community-led'. But when it comes to national or even regional decision-making, this new spirit of inclusion vanishes.

We caught sight of it briefly last year when the Government announced an open 'blue skies' debate on housing capital finance. The London Tenants Federation debated the issues and we made our response. The fact that the government unusually opened up consultation in this fashion led many to conclude that it was offering genuine consultation and that the views of tenants would be listened to.

Our response was based around our key request that the government invest positively in council housing and provide genuine choice for the vast majority who want decent homes and to remain as council tenants. We made a plea for council tenants not to be blamed for 'past problems and mistakes of policy makers'.

Specifically, we recommended that government take over council debt, effectively giving councils an injection of 'new' money as it has done for stock transfer landlords; that housing benefit be removed altogether from the council accounts and be administered centrally by DWP like other benefits; and that all rental and capital receipts income be retained and re-invested in council housing. We noted that if hanging debt were placed outside the equation, this would immediately provide an extra £450 million for investment in council homes in London. We argued that all councils should be free to borrow prudentially. We made clear that council tenants should have the right to choose how their homes are managed, but that this decision should be separate from issues of finance.

The government's statement that there will be no extra cash for councils that don't go for stock transfer, PFI, and ALMO asserts financial coercion and removes even pretence of choice. Tenants in areas like Camden ask why they are being pushed to set up new structures at great cost when the status quo is doing well. In some London boroughs tenants organisations are literally being torn apart over these issues. Tenants in areas like Hackney and Islington who reject stock transfer wonder what will happen when their councils are simply not performing well enough even to begin the ALMO debate.

In the Communities Statement, which was published on 5th February 2003, the government announced its intention to set up Housing Boards to prepare Regional Housing Strategies. They will have responsibility for distributing capital funding for new social housing. The London Housing Board will be brought together and chaired by the Government Office for London. The board will include representatives from London boroughs, Housing Corporation, the GLA, English Partnerships and the London Development Agency. So when the Government says tenants should be involved at 'every level of decision making', the obvious question is where are the tenant representatives?

GOL have told us we can have regular meetings with them. This could be a start, but it is a long way from genuine participation. The fear for tenants is that consultation meeting are often, as occurs in many of our local authorities, actually no more than an opportunity to report back decisions already taken. Tenant representatives know that instead of increasing genuine participation, 'con-sultation' after the event only encourages disengagement.

• Regional Decision Making