The answers to the question of why they were ignored remain, in many ways, outstanding. I am not going to attempt to answer it here and now, either, but perhaps the end of this week is not a bad time to briefly consider some of the possible roots of it. 1/n https://twitter.com/PeteApps/status/1385568697708859396

A lot of the issues behind the question about why tenants are ignored have been touched on in some of the work that has gone on since the Grenfell Tower Fire. Am not going to cover everything but, for me, the nub of these issues is just a few relatively simple things. 2/n

Usual proviso/disclaimer about these being my opinions, and the bits I am going to tweet about are about the landlord culture stuff and the things that have made their way into the Green Paper/Charter arena, not so much the technical fire/building safety 3/n

and legal stuff, all of which have much better experts than I. Perhaps now a good moment to reiterate just how good Inside Housing's coverage of all this has been, too. 4/n

The eventually-published Social Housing Green Paper took a lot of information from tenants and residents. This was gathered through ministerial roadshows and wide consultation. It covered a lot of ground but one of its clearest messages was about an imbalance of power. 5/n

The reason people are ignored is ultimately this imbalance of power. It is probably more comfortable to think about what will happen in future so that people are not treated badly, but I don't really feel like anyone should bypass the uncomfortable questions raised. 6/n

An imbalance of power is a bit of a distant, impersonal idea. Really what has gone wrong is that the cultures of organisations have reached a place where people who work at them feel like it's Ok to treat other people differently than they themselves would accept or tolerate. 7/n

Organisational culture is also a distant, impersonal idea, and only goes some way to explaining why individuals feel comfortable treating others in what, once they are revealed, seem unconscionable ways. 8/n

For me, a lot of this is linked, somewhere, somehow, into the way social housing in particular is discussed and has been portrayed more generally - the normalisation of things like Benefits Street/How To Get A Council House and that style of judgemental rubbish. 9/n

This is not to excuse the particular misuse of power that keeps getting highlighted at landlords, and which is at the heart of the repeated cropping-up of stories of all kinds of disrepair and terrible landlording. 10/n

And it's necessary to be fair and say that this might not be representative of all landlords, and that we can always point to examples of good stuff, but ultimately there is nothing in the structures this stuff operates within that stops the bad stuff as things stand. 11/n

I remain not a big fan of legislating and regulating to sort bad landlording out. That used to be more true than it is now, because I think I feel like self-monitoring and self-policing keeps failing residents in practical ways, let alone allowing festering cultures. 12/n

Because I am ultimately an optimist, I do think that the Charter, the beginnings of changes at the Ombudsman and the proposed changes at the Regulator of Social Housing are stepping-stones to ways of identifying the worst/bad practitioners but 13/n

.. you can't ultimately legislate for good cultures. Good professional cultures and an ethical, values-based set of principles are what organisations and those who work there have to do themselves and measuring this is never going to quite fit any regulatory framework. 14/n

Nearly done. 15/n

I really don't like the kind of "when I went to Grenfell" narratives used since the fire, I think they can be unhelpful and are sometimes unnecessary because what this week has reminded us is the community doesn't need anyone else to represent it but 16/n

as one of the Shelter commissioners, we heard first-hand from people whose written and in-person testimony this week, as shocking as it still is, has only told part of the story about just how disrespectfully families were treated. 17/n

Some of this stuff sounds small - not being able to agree a time when repairs can be completed, for example. These kinds of problems are caused or exacerbated by assumptions that somebody will always be home when they live in social housing, because they are not at work 18/n

And a lot of other assumptions based in stuff that is corrosive and judgemental. What has been so deflating while waiting for legislation and regulation is that a lot of these attitudes have not widely changed across the sector, although, again as an optimist, 19/n

some progress has perhaps been made as organisations seek to improve things like complaints responses, sometimes to capture things that are raised informally. To me this is a pretty bare-bones response, but at least it's something.

BUT 20/n

That's not enough.

Like it or not, the power imbalance remains, and is perhaps untippable in a relationship increasingly framed as transactional. Asserting that tenants/residents are at the heart of what organisations do* is something anyone can say. 21/n

*this phrase is really annoying and often the worst kind of lip-service.

The things organisations & those who work there say are driven by not just their values but their culture. My worry is that the effects of not really addressing the necessity for wider culture change 22/n

across the sector is that it/we won't shift out of the problematic framing of almost everything.

Positive things, for me, beyond regs & legislation, are where some orgs are considering what part they play in stigma, where things like Together With Tenants would never have 23/n

existed, not that long ago... accepting this is not the ideal way to rebalance relationships. Also recent talk of wider professional standards is a start.

These things are still in a place where they are kind of membership options, though. 24/n

one more

There is a lot of readily-available information about what the small number of great registered providers do. There's probably not a perfect model, but inside the sector there is still a lot of lauded exceptionalism when really not everyone is yet getting the basics right. 25/25

Oh, and stop with the awards.