This week, the government confirmed the first strategic partnership allocations from its Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP): £9.58 billion to 33 providers across England (outside London) to deliver more than 70,000 homes, with nearly two-thirds for social rent, confirmed directly in MHCLG’s own policy paper. It’s the first tranche of the wider £39 billion, ten-year SAHP aiming for 300,000 social and affordable homes.

For housing associations, the headline isn’t really the money. It’s what the money means operationally: a genuinely large wave of brand-new tenancies, landing over the next few years, at a pace most housing communications and engagement teams haven’t had to plan for in a generation. Every one of those tenancies starts the same way every tenancy does, at zero trust, and this wave is arriving at exactly the moment the regulatory bar for proving that trust is being built is rising, not falling.

Of the £9.58 billion, an estimated £2.45 billion is earmarked for delivery in the six Established Mayoral Strategic Authority areas outside London (Greater Manchester, West Midlands, North East, West Yorkshire, Liverpool City Region and South Yorkshire), where mayors set the strategic direction for the programme in their areas. Over £16 billion outside London and around £5 billion in London remain to be allocated across the rest of the programme’s ten-year life, confirmed in the same MHCLG policy paper.

One detail worth knowing if your organisation isn’t among the 33 named partners: the strategic partnership bidding round has closed, but the separate Continuous Market Engagement (CME) route remains open on an ongoing, scheme-by-scheme basis, so this isn’t a closed door for organisations outside this first wave.

Crucially for this audience, the funding isn’t council-only, though reinvigorating direct council housebuilding is an explicit strategic priority. For the first time, three councils, Cambridge City Council, Eastleigh Borough Council and Newcastle City Council, have been awarded strategic partnership status with Homes England directly, alongside 30 housing associations and other registered providers. The National Housing Federation welcomed the announcement as “hugely welcome” and confirmed it is already pushing for a further round of allocations and additional grant funding at the Autumn Budget.

It’s not without criticism. Opposition politicians have questioned the delivery timeline (some homes are not required to be completed until 2039) and the fact that most of the funding falls outside the current Parliament’s spending review period. Shelter has welcomed the announcement while noting the scale still falls short of the roughly 90,000 social homes a year that housing and homelessness organisations say is actually needed. None of that changes what’s coming operationally: funding is flowing, and building is expected to start.

A new tenancy is the purest version of the challenge our Trust Pyramid framework describes. There’s no history to draw on, no existing relationship, nothing earned yet. Every layer has to be built from the first point of contact.

• Open & Honest Communication. A new tenant’s first experience of their landlord is often the letter, portal, or call confirming their tenancy. What that communication looks like sets the tone for everything after it.
• Listening. Thousands of new tenants arriving at pace means thousands of new sets of concerns, questions and expectations arriving at the same time, with no existing feedback history to draw on.
• Engagement. New estates, new communities, and in several of these areas, new neighbourhoods being built from scratch. Engagement here isn’t a consultation exercise, it’s building a relationship with a place that didn’t exist as a community six months earlier.
• Experience. First impressions compound. A slow, inconsistent, or confusing first year is far harder to recover from with a brand-new tenant than with someone who already has years of goodwill banked.
• Trust. The outcome all of the above is building toward, and, fittingly, the thing this whole funding programme is ultimately trying to earn back at a national scale, given the sector’s history since the Right to Buy sell-offs of the 1980s.

The National Housing Federation’s own Together with Tenants charter, adopted by over 225 housing associations, exists for exactly this reason: it commits landlords to genuine resident voice, influence and accountability from the outset, not something retrofitted once problems appear.

• A unified inbox from day one. New tenant’s queries, across social media, live chat, Whatsapp and SMS, logged centrally and consistently from their very first contact, not retrofitted once there’s a backlog.
• Social Listening for new estates and communities. Understanding sentiment and concerns in a newly-formed community, where there’s no existing resident group or history to draw on, before small concerns become bigger ones.
• Structured, repeatable engagement. Surveys and consultation tools that scale to thousands of new tenants at once, rather than relying on a single launch event nobody can reference again.
• STAIRs-ready publication from the start. Getting proactive publication habits right for new tenancies now means October 2026 doesn’t require retrofitting them for a much larger tenant base than you had when you first planned for it.
• Trust Indicator. A way to actually show, over the life of this programme, whether trust with these new communities is moving in the right direction, useful for your own board, and just as useful if funders or government ask for evidence that the money is working.

Orlo already works with 44 housing associations, part of the 400+ public sector organisations on the platform (orlo.tech/industries/housing).

If your organisation is planning for a share of this funding, or already gearing up to onboard new tenants at scale, a demo is the fastest way to see how Orlo can support that work from day one.

• The government has allocated £9.58 billion to 33 strategic partners as the first tranche of the £39 billion, ten-year Social and Affordable Homes Programme, aiming for 300,000 social and affordable homes with at least 60% for social rent.
• For the first time, three councils (Cambridge City Council, Eastleigh Borough Council and Newcastle City Council) have been awarded strategic partnership status directly, alongside 30 housing associations and other registered providers.
• Two of the 33 named strategic partners, Stonewater and Thirteen Group, are already Orlo customers with published case studies.
• This means a genuinely large, fast-moving wave of new tenancies for many housing associations, arriving with no existing tenant relationship or history to build on.
• It lands in the same window as STAIRs (1 October 2026) and ongoing RSH consumer standards scrutiny, making day-one trust building and day-one compliance the same job, not two separate ones.
• The National Housing Federation’s Together with Tenants charter and Orlo’s Trust Pyramid both describe the same underlying challenge: trust has to be built deliberately, especially where there’s no history to rely on.