This article considers the role of information and trust in Private Finance Initiative (PFI) ‘Pathfinder’ schemes in the social housing sector in England. It uses the work of Tomkins (2001) and a series of interviews with local authority PFI project managers to provide a critique of the structure of the pathfinder process. The authors conclude that the pathfinder process cannot provide information about willingness to trust and they suggest that this may be one of the reasons for the delay in the contractual signing of the first wave of these schemes.