A newly formed activist organisation says it plans to intensify its efforts in the New Year, declaring that its mission is to “advocate for legislative and political policy changes that favour tenants and residents, not landlords.”

Writing in The Big Issue, the group’s secretary, Suzanne Muna, characterises the recently passed Renters’ Rights Act — including the end of Section 21 evictions — as “a very small step.”

The organisation, known as the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC), emerged from Unite the Union’s housing workers branch. It says it “links tenants, renters, shared owners, and leaseholders living in homes owned by housing association, council, and private landlords.”

The group says it relies on voluntary contributions and union support, noting on its website that it is “without the bottomless resources our landlords enjoy.” The site adds: “We maintain strong ties with trade unions, aiming to bring together tenants, residents and workers on issues of common cause. Together we campaign to improve people’s housing conditions and to reduce the commercialisation of public housing.”

In her Big Issue piece, she argues that SHAC has emerged directly in response to the direction of current housing policy.

She writes: “There are few signs from the Labour government that they are intent on reversing the catastrophic decisions that have led us to where we are now – record numbers of people who are homeless or in insecure, unsuitable, dilapidated, overcrowded, accommodation. Systematic financial exploitation through soaring rents and unregulated service charges. And landlords who are allowed to bully, discriminate, intimidate and otherwise act without accountability because tenant and resident protections have been weakened and enforcement systems eroded to the point of pointlessness.”

And she tells the government it is being” increasingly and willingly beholden to big developers and private corporate landlords.”

Muna states: “The housing union project will seek its primary support and partnership not from landlords or government who have failed the working class so badly on housing, but from the trade unions who have both the funding and reach to take it onto a mass scale.”