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Homes England’s £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme: what it means for Norfolk
Homes England announced a £39bn ten-year social and affordable housing programme on 25 August 2026. No Norfolk council or Norfolk-based housing association was named among the 33 first-wave strategic partners, but three separate funding routes should still deliver new social
The Government announced its largest social and affordable housing programme in a generation on 25 August 2026. The headline number is £39 billion over ten years. The honest picture for Norfolk is that no Norfolk council or Norfolk-based housing association appears on the first-wave strategic partner list, but three separate funding routes should still deliver new social and affordable homes across the county before 2030.
What was announced
The Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) commits £39 billion of grant funding between 2026 and 2036. Homes England, the Government’s housing delivery body, is the counterparty for providers outside London. The Greater London Authority takes its own £6 billion allocation for the capital.
The first wave is worth about £9.58 billion. That funding is going to 33 strategic partners, a mix of councils and large housing associations, and is expected to deliver around 80,000 new homes between now and 2036. At least 60% of the homes built under SAHP must be for Social Rent, which is the deepest-discount tenure and the one with the longest waiting lists across most of England, including Norfolk.
The programme is being run alongside two other measures announced the same week. Councils will keep more of the money they raise from Right to Buy sales, with £1.61 billion in retained receipts confirmed for 2025 to 2026, and a new Capacity to Build fund worth £46 million over three years to pay for council housing teams, land assembly and delivery capacity. Section 106 planning agreements, which oblige developers to include affordable homes in larger private schemes, remain in place.
Who got the money in the first wave
The largest single first-wave allocation went to Greater Manchester, with £529 million for around 4,400 homes. The West Midlands received £409 million (about 3,200 homes), the North East £445 million (about 3,400 homes), West Yorkshire £441 million (about 4,000 homes), Liverpool City Region £380 million (about 3,100 homes) and South Yorkshire £249 million (about 2,200 homes). The rest of the first-wave money is spread across individual housing associations, unitary authorities and combined authorities.
Norfolk is not on that list. Neither Norfolk County Council, any of the seven district and borough councils (Broadland, Breckland, Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, North Norfolk, Norwich, South Norfolk), nor any Norfolk-headquartered housing association appears among the named strategic partners. The largest social landlords in the county, including Flagship Group in Norwich, Broadland Housing Association, Saffron Housing Trust in Long Stratton and Freebridge Community Housing in King’s Lynn, will therefore need to compete for money through the second funding route Homes England is running, rather than take a share of the £9.58 billion up front.
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How Norfolk still benefits
The second route is Continuous Market Engagement (CME). This is Homes England’s standing bidding process for smaller and medium-sized providers. Any registered provider of social housing, and any local authority, can propose specific schemes for grant funding at any point during the ten-year programme. CME allocations are announced quarterly. For a Norfolk housing association planning a scheme in, say, Long Stratton, Aylsham or Downham Market, this is the practical way in.
The Right to Buy receipt changes matter separately. Previous rules forced councils to spend RTB money within a short window and match it pound-for-pound with borrowing, which pushed some Norfolk district councils into passing sales money back to central government rather than reinvesting locally. The 2026 rules loosen both constraints. That mostly matters for Norwich City Council, which has run a small council house building programme through the 2020s (its Goldsmith Street scheme won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2019) and now has more room to expand its pipeline.
Section 106 is where most Norfolk affordable housing has actually been coming from. New estates around Wymondham, Rackheath, Long Stratton and Costessey have delivered affordable units at policy targets ranging from around 20% to 33% under district planning rules. The 2026 announcement does not change the mechanism, but it signals that the Government wants planning authorities to hold the line on those percentages rather than let developers negotiate them down through viability assessments.
What this means if you are looking to move
If you are on a Norfolk council waiting list for social rent, this programme is meaningful but slow. New Social Rent homes funded in the first wave will typically be on site by late 2027 and completing from 2028 onwards. Norfolk waiting lists are administered by individual district councils, most through shared allocation systems and Norwich City Council through its own. If you are not on a register and you want to be considered for any new social rent homes when they come, an application to the relevant district council is where it starts.
If you are looking at shared ownership, the picture is more immediate. Most large Norfolk new-build sites include a shared ownership component, delivered by whichever housing association the developer has partnered with. Flagship, Broadland Housing Association, Saffron and Sanctuary all currently sell shared ownership stock across the county. SAHP is expected to increase the shared ownership pipeline over the next three to five years, though the 60% Social Rent floor means it will not be the priority tenure.
If you are looking to buy outright, the effect is indirect. Additional supply of social and affordable homes reduces the pressure on the lower end of the private market, but at the volumes involved, the impact on Norfolk asking prices in the £150,000 to £250,000 bracket is likely to be modest and slow. The recent local drivers of price movement, particularly the Cambridge and Norwich commuter belts and the coastal second-home rules, will remain bigger factors.
What to watch over the next 12 months
Three things are worth tracking. The first is which Norfolk housing associations pick up CME allocations at the quarterly announcements from Homes England, most likely from late 2026 onwards. The second is whether Norwich City Council announces a scaled-up council house building programme in its 2027 to 2028 budget, which is when the changed Right to Buy rules will start to show in the numbers. The third is Norfolk district council decisions on planning applications for larger sites, where the Section 106 affordable housing percentages agreed between now and 2027 will shape the pipeline for years afterwards.
We will update this piece when the first Norfolk allocations under CME are announced.
Sources: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government announcement 25 August 2026; Homes England Social and Affordable Homes Programme strategic partners letter, August 2026; letter to council leaders on Right to Buy and Capacity to Build, August 2026.
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