Why tenant engagement must shape the future of affordable housing - The subject at our recent LA meetup
Wednesday 23rd of July 2025
When it comes to new affordable housing, tenant engagement needs to be part of the conversation.
The big takeaway from our July Local Authority and ALMO tenant engagement staff meetup, was that with Government plans to invest £39 billion in affordable housing just around the corner, we need to be thinking hard about the role that tenant engagement can play.
This meetup focussed on the government plans to significantly invest in affordable housing and how these plans might affect existing tenants. We were joined by James Prestwich, a policy advisor with Tpas, who shared his thoughts on the topic in a fishbowl conversation. We recorded the whole thing so, if you would like to hear what was said, click here to watch the video.
We heard from James how, whilst this big investment in affordable housing is clearly very welcome, there might also be some concerns around, for example, the lack of focus on regeneration, the implications for new infrastructure to support new estates and the potential lack of capacity for many councils to deliver new housing. Linked to this we also talked about how devolution could make it difficult for councils, as this process will take up a lot of their attention and limited resources.
We also talked about tenant engagement and how its role in future building programmes might be greater that you might think. For one thing, tenants can help with the design of new homes and new estates – they are the experts in what works after all. Tenants will also have a wider interest in new housing developments. There may be hopes that the needs of friends or relatives might be met and there might be fears about the impact on the local area and local services. Either way, giving tenants the opportunity to air their views and discuss plans should be high on the agenda.
And let’s not forget that the rents of current tenants are an important part of the story when it comes to funding future homes.
Of course, there will be big differences between areas. For that reason alone, engagement officers might want to start asking about how their council might be affected and communicating this to residents. This might also be a good moment to highlight to service leaders the value of tenant engagement for any new schemes.
About the meetup
The meetup took place on Zoom on 16th July 2025. We had 16 engagement officers taking part. For the recorded fishbowl interview, we invited participants to share ideas for questions halfway through.
For the first half of the session, we had our regular ‘nine-minute networking’ – two nine-minute rounds of discussing two talking points in groups of 3 or 4, mixed up for the second round. The talking points were: Thinking about your tenant engagement work; what’s your best hope for the next 12 months? What’s your biggest challenge for the next 12 months? We finished, as always, with ‘open space’ – an opportunity for participants to raise anything at all to the whole group.
We hope to see you at our next meet you which is taking place on 23rd October, book your place here
Dave Mckenna
Tpas Associate