Shaping Places, Strengthening Communities

Strategic Plan foreword

PlaceShapers exists to ensure social housing providers are recognised, supported and enabled as England’s leading place-shapers - creating communities where people can thrive. We are a vibrant national network of place-shaping housing organisations and our long-term vision is to put place-shaping at the heart of decision-making.  

Over the last three years we have worked towards achieving that vision through the delivery of our 'Communicate, Connect and Collaborate' goals in our Strategic Plan (2023 – 2026). We met senior politicians, including the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, influenced the 2025 Spending Review, launched a new learning programme and learning hub, and continued to showcase and champion the work of our members.   

We inspired, challenged, supported, encouraged and enabled our members to deliver place-shaping work that will benefit residents and communities now and into the future. This was against a backdrop of significant change and challenge for our members and their communities. We faced a cost-of-living crisis, an escalating housing and homelessness crisis, a social housing rent cap, political upheaval, and increasingly stretched business plans.

Looking ahead, with a government focussed on social housing and a decade of national renewal, there is a real opportunity to cement the crucial role of our members as community anchors and place-shapers and secure the support we need to do more. But we know this won’t be easy. Many social housing providers face competing priorities and limited capacity, and the place-shaping role of our members is still often overlooked and misunderstood.  

As the custodians of the place-shaping work of the sector, PlaceShapers is more important than ever. To play our part as successfully as possible will rely on us deepening our reach with members and our impact with stakeholders. We will do this by continuing to bring in new members, working in partnership with others and with our resident allies, and amplifying the voice of our members. 

Our new three-year Strategic Plan, which takes us to 2029, isn’t a significant change in direction for PlaceShapers, but builds on the successes of the previous Plan. We will continue to share good practice and inspiration with members, but we will also focus on supporting place-shaping and decision making at a strategic level.  

We are ambitious for the work of our members and the role of PlaceShapers, which is reflected in the three goals in the Plan, along with our overall ambition to enable our members to develop their approach to place-shaping over the next three years.  

We are looking forward to working with our members, our partners, residents and communities over the next three years to do all we can to put place-shaping at the heart of decision-making.

Catherine Ryder, Chief Executive