PLANS for a new housing union, complete with rent strikes and legal advocacy, will be launched at TUC Congress tomorrow.

Volunteers at the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC) will present their 70-page blueprint for the union at a fringe event.

SHAC co-founder and secretary Suzanne Muna told the Morning Star that the proposals in the document would leave Yes Minister character Sir Humphrey “turning in his grave.”

“We are anticipating a big fightback but if it doesn’t happen here, we are not going to stop,” she said.

“It’s cleaned out the SHAC account bringing us here but I would have been outside with a cardboard box with copies of the blueprint — this is going to happen and it’s just a matter of when.”

SHAC volunteers have spent hundreds of hours over the past year preparing the blueprint and are now looking to get union buy-in at the TUC.

Asked why one hasn’t been set up until now, Ms Muna said that amid council and charity cutbacks on the services the union would provide, that “it’s becoming clear to people that none of these parties are speaking for us on housing now so we need to create tenant and resident power. 

“I think the lack of working-class representation is a massive factor and that is something that’s been a gradual process of erosion. As the Labour Party has moved further and further away from workers it took people a while to realise you can’t reclaim it.

“Tenants and residents are not given any real power to change how their landlords behave and hold them into account. 

“The problem isn’t that the law isn’t there, the problem is that people don’t have any way to actually enforce it.”

SHAC hopes that trade unions will offer membership of the provisionally named “national housing union for all tenants and residents” to new sign-ups and vice versa.

Ms Muna said that Britain’s leasehold system gives landlords excessive power over tenants, and allows them to use legal warfare to stifle government efforts to boost renter rights, pointing to Labour ruling out rent controls last month.

“What we are looking for is a fundamental shift in landlord power; they won’t allow us to take an inch let alone a mile,” she said.