The government has allocated £9.58bn to 33 housing providers outside London to support the delivery of 73,600 new social and affordable homes over the next decade, in the first major wave of funding from its £39bn housing programme.
The allocations were announced on Tuesday by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in the names of the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and the Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner. The department described the package as "nearly £10 billion" supporting "more than 70,000 homes across England".
It is the first named tranche of money under the Social and Affordable Homes Programme, the ten-year successor to the Affordable Homes Programme, whose £39bn total was set at the Spending Review in June 2025. The programme is targeted at around 300,000 homes by 2036, at least 60% of them for social rent.
The department said around 60% of homes delivered through the new partnerships are expected to be for social rent, describing the share elsewhere in the same release as nearly two-thirds. Councils will be awarded strategic partner status with Homes England alongside housing associations. The Guardian reported that three of the 33 partners will be local authorities, a figure not set out in the government's release. The partners themselves, and their individual allocations, were not named.
The release gives estimated spending by region: £529m supporting about 4,400 homes in Greater Manchester; £445m for about 3,400 homes in the North East; £441m for about 4,000 in West Yorkshire; £409m for about 3,200 in the West Midlands; £380m for about 3,100 in the Liverpool City Region; and £249m for about 2,200 in South Yorkshire. The money is awarded to providers rather than to combined authorities, with Homes England the final decision maker on bids outside London.
Separately, the Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, is allocating £6bn from the capital's share of the programme, which is worth up to £11.7bn over ten years. The Press Association reported that the government has confirmed £3.3bn to City Hall over the four years to 2030, with the wider £6bn allocated at an early stage against the ten-year envelope.
Khan said: "Thousands of Londoners will benefit from this new wave of new social and affordable homes, which will help people out of temporary accommodation…" He said he wanted to deliver a "step change" in the number of council homes built in the capital.
The Conservatives attacked the timing of the spending. Sir James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, said: "The small print shows homes won't have to be delivered until 2039." Programme rules require schemes to start on site by March 2036 and complete by March 2039, and the National Housing Federation has said annual spending under the programme rises to £4bn in 2029-30 before increasing with inflation.
The announcement is the first major housing intervention of Burnham's premiership, which began on 20 July. He has pledged the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war period, and told a campaign event in his former constituency, according to the Guardian: "There's £39bn allocated over a 10-year period … I'm saying that should be dedicated to council homes." The Guardian reported that ministers have instead spread the initial funding across a mix of subsidised tenures.
Four newly established mayoral strategic authorities — Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, the East Midlands, the West of England, and York and North Yorkshire — will now be able to set the strategic direction of the programme in their areas. The department said further funding would be allocated over the programme's lifetime.
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