Tenants' co-operatives could be set to become a revolutionary new way to manage council homes in Sussex.

Local authorities are having to choose whether they should keep their council houses or transfer the stock to a different type of ownership.

The Government wants all council-owned homes brought up to a decent standard by 2010, with a third of the necessary repairs done by next year.

Without much money available, councils are being encouraged to test selling off their stock to housing associations, or to explore alternatives.

Ministers are also willing to write off housing debt for councils where tenants vote to transfer to housing associations, a move described as blackmail by campaigners fighting sell-offs.

But whether councils continue to operate houses themselves or find alternatives is largely up to the tenants.

People in cities such as Birmingham, with huge numbers of council houses, have already been balloted and voted overwhelmingly against losing council control.

At present, there are no plans for major changes for tenants of Brighton and Hove's 13,000 council houses and flats.

A survey of the council's stock is under way but the results are not expected until after the May local elections.

No decision about the future of the council's homes is expected until the survey is published.

There are four main options:

To keep things as they are with the council in control.

Enter into private finance initiative deals to get the maintenance and repair work done.

Transfer the houses to housing associations.

Set up arms-length companies to manage and maintain the homes.

The latter two options have to be approved in a ballot of tenants.

A conference in Hove on Friday, organised by the Sussex Co-operative Party and the South-East Co-op, concentrated on housing co-ops as a form of arms-length company.

The main benefits of co-operatives are they are not profit making and tenants are members of the team which owns their homes.

Backers of the co-operative idea believe it makes people feel more involved in their communities and gives them more power over the way they are housed.

Labour and Co-operative Party MP David Lepper, one of the main speakers, said a report by Price Waterhouse in the Nineties found plenty of evidence to support co-ops as the best form of tenant-owned or tenant-managed arrangement.

Mr Lepper said: "We were not saying councils ought to get rid of their council housing.

"If there has to be a vote in Brighton and Hove, I believe most tenants would vote to stay with the council.

"But when tenants are willing to consider a change to the system, we, as members of the co-operative movement, ought to be making sure the virtues of housing co-ops are among the things on offer to them.

"We believe co-ops give tenants greater control over their own lives and the way they organise their own housing.

"What tenants are saying to me is we might have grumbles about the council from time to time but we would rather stay with the council than transfer to another landlord."

Council housing accounts for about 11 per cent of the city's housing stock. The other six per cent of the city's low-cost homes are owned by housing associations.

Pressure group Defend Council Housing lobbied Parliament this week to call for an end to sell-offs and transfers, which it dubs as privatisation.

Backed by trade unions, the group wants more investment in council housing and for all the homes to stay under local authority control.

Among the group's demands are to allow councils to borrow to invest in housing and to use government housing cash to build new council houses and flats.

Ruth Arundel, of Defend Council Housing in Brighton and Hove, said co-ops were better than some of the options but there were still pitfalls.

She said: "I would not be against anybody who wanted to make that available as an option but I would not regard it as the ideal solution because the majority of tenants do not want to be involved in running their housing."

She said sell-offs would take power away from tenants and arms-length companies were a "half-way house" to privatisation.

She said: "It is democratic. We have the right to vote our landlords out of office if we are dissatisfied and the tenancies are the most secure kind of tenancy you can get.

"There is a housing crisis in Brighton and Hove already.

"If you take council housing, which has got the lowest rents for reasonably decent housing in the city, out of the council and into housing associations, which are likely to push rents up, then you are immediately going to exacerbate the housing crisis."