Nurturing Ideas to Change
the Housing System

We will back promising housing ideas, allowing them to be tested, and then help them move through into action, influence and ultimately widespread implementation.


We know that there are many organisations and communities with brilliant, imaginative and different ideas about how to deliver the right sort of housing or housing support, which can tackle systemic failings in the housing system. We want to back these promising ideas, allowing them to be trialled and tested, and then help them move through into action, influence and ultimately widespread implementation.

The change we want to see is that as a result of our support, ideas for protecting and creating decent affordable homes will flourish. By this we mean that ultimately they are put into practice and gain investment from other funders, lenders or government to increase the scale at which they are delivered. This will result in changes that will lead to an increase in the number of homes for people in need.

Our ambition is that some of the ideas we initially support will eventually show enough promise to leverage funding from other sources and will then gain momentum. We want to ensure that in 10 years’ time there are many more proven solutions underway, operating to protect and increase the supply of decent, affordable homes for people in need.

The work we support includes researching, testing, developing, piloting and evaluating ideas. The opportunity for ideas to be scaled-up or be replicable at a later stage is important to us, but we know that in some cases they need to be explored before their potential is known. We know that not every idea we support will be successful, but we want to give them the best possible chance to thrive and to bring those with greatest promise into practice.

The ideas we back go beyond case by case approaches, beyond organisational boundaries and offer more than a sticking plaster. Unless we attempt to deal with the root causes of our broken housing system, we will only be mitigating the consequences of it, or even covering its failure, and therefore we will not create the systemic change we want to see.

To view funding allocated under this programme from 2016–present, click here.

See our available funding