Tackling Stigma or Protecting the System?

When Inside Housing published a recent comment piece from Stop Social Housing Stigma (SSHS), it framed the group as a “tenant-led” movement taking the fight to stigma in social housing.

But scratch beneath the surface and a familiar pattern emerges — sector-funded initiatives, the same network of insiders, and another badge for landlords to pin to their websites.

Once something becomes a feature in Inside Housing, it’s no longer grassroots. It becomes part of the echo chamber: the closed loop of consultants, executives and “experts” talking about tenants rather than with them.

SSHS may speak the language of activism, but it’s financed and supported by the very organisations it claims to challenge. When your funding depends on the system, you can’t challenge it honestly.

In its Inside Housing article, SSHS even described itself as “the national tenant-led organisation that perhaps has the most knowledge in the country about tackling stigma.”

That line says it all. Declaring yourself the expert on stigma while operating inside the same professional networks that created it is not empowerment — it’s appropriation.

The group was right about one thing:

“Putting letters after people’s names will not contribute to tackling stigma.”

Qualifications don’t change behaviour. But if SSHS truly believes the issue is cultural, why surround itself with the same professional bodies that perpetuate that culture?

The Competence and Conduct Standard isn’t the problem — the mindset of those enforcing it is.

On 18 June 2025, I spoke with an SSHS committee member who described her personal motivation for joining the group and her experience as both tenant and employee inside a housing organisation.

“I actually raised concerns that I had about the culture in that organisation and wanted them to act on it. And I understand exactly what you’re saying about this badge of honour. I am in total agreement.”

That “badge of honour” remark cuts to the core. It captures what many residents already suspect — that initiatives like SSHS are less about change and more about display: branding exercises designed to signal virtue rather than deliver reform.

When I asked what SSHS hoped to achieve, she admitted:

“Personally, I would like it to be to eliminate stigma… but I believe the majority would say reduce stigma.”

Even that quiet shift from eliminate to reduce shows how quickly ambition is diluted once something becomes institutional. The conversation drifted into “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “accessibility,” and “journey planners” — the same sector vocabulary that has circled for years, producing endless frameworks but no measurable change.

As I said during the call:

“Housing associations already boast about their EDI programmes… If the stigma exists within a housing association, that surely comes down to HR recruitment — and then HR to performance-manage them out if they show attitudes that don’t coincide with their credo.”

Stigma isn’t a communications problem. It’s a leadership problem.
You can’t train prejudice out of an executive culture that’s been allowed to look down on tenants for decades.

Even the SSHS member voiced discomfort at the organisation’s direction:

“It really sticks in my throat that there are quite a few corporate members… We can’t do that by just posting on LinkedIn. We need to be going out and targeting people’s stories.”

That tension — between genuine tenants wanting change and the corporate machinery funding it — is precisely the issue. SSHS has become enmeshed with the very establishment it was meant to hold to account: Nic Bliss, the National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing — the same speakers, the same conferences, the same slogans about “ending stigma.”

A Closed Loop of Professionalised Advocacy

What’s really happening is a closed economy of virtue.

Housing associations fund these campaigns using residents’ rent and service-charge income. In return, they get to display a digital badge — “Stop Social Housing Stigma” — and announce themselves as part of the solution.

When we look at the other organisations funding this — TPAS, Big Picture Training, L&Q, Sovereign Network, Places for People, SOHA, the Chartered Institute of Housing, and Hyde — the only reason these companies put their names to it is to protect their revenue streams or to promote themselves as bastions of positive influence within the housing sector.

By taking this money and appearing at these events, Stop Social Housing Stigma doesn’t challenge the system — it props it up. It becomes another carefully managed performance of progress, another round of applause within the same echo chamber. The language of change disguises a culture of self-preservation.

They’re not the solution. They’re protection — protecting themselves, protecting their income, and securing their seats at the very table that should exist to hold them to account.

Meanwhile, tenants still face neglect, mould, unaffordable service charges and dismissive treatment. The money that could have gone into repairs and safety instead bankrolls panel discussions and photo opportunities for executives.

Stop Social Housing Stigma has become another way of recycling residents’ money — from tenants’ pockets into landlords’ PR budgets. Housing associations pay Nic Bliss and his band of sector insiders to appear at CIH, NHF and every other industry event to “stop” something they are structurally incapable of stopping.

You cannot fix stigma without changing culture. And culture cannot be changed by the same people responsible for protecting it.

If senior leaders and CEOs still view residents as a reputational risk rather than equal partners, no badge, workshop or training session will make a difference.

The answer isn’t another committee or conference — it’s accountability in hiring, governance and leadership. Those who perpetuate contempt for tenants must be managed out, not invited onto another panel.

Stigma doesn’t live in the public imagination alone; it lives in boardrooms.

Until those rooms change, every campaign that claims to fight stigma will simply reinforce it.

In Conclusion

Stop Social Housing Stigma has become part of the system it set out to challenge — a mirror held up to the sector’s own self-importance.

This isn’t about tackling stigma anymore. It’s about controlling the narrative and keeping residents one step removed from real influence.

If the sector truly wants to end stigma, it should start by cleaning its own house — not commissioning another badge to prove it’s trying.

Extracts quoted from a recorded conversation with an SSHS committee member, 18 June 2025.