profile
Matt Williams
Matt Williams is the Managing Director at Polypipe Building Products, joining the business in May 2023 from TradeKart Limited where he held the position of Operations Director. Prior to that, Matt held Operational Leadership roles at RWC and AkzoNobel, where he enjoyed great success in business transformation, process optimisation, and operational excellence.
Polypipe Building Products are part of the Sustainable Building Solutions Business Unit within Genuit, focusing on providing a range of solutions to reduce carbon content in the built environment.
Polypipe Building Products is the UK’s leading manufacturer of plastic piping systems and low-carbon heating solutions for the residential market. They design, develop, and manufacture over 20,000 product lines which are stocked in plumbers and builders’ merchants nationally.
Polypipe
Polypipe Building Products, part of Genuit Group, is one of Europe’s largest and most innovative manufacturers of plastic piping systems and low-carbon heating solutions for the residential market. At Polypipe Building Products, we specialise in products for domestic properties for both the new build and RMI markets with over 5,000 products to suit any installation in a range of aesthetics. Over our 40-year exitance, we have grown from a small plastic pipe manufacturer based in Doncaster, to a group of 17 businesses helping the UK construction industry build better and more sustainably.
As Genuit group, we consider ourselves thought leaders in the future sustainable built environment and we provide construction solutions way beyond plastic pipes and fittings, ranging from MVHR and SuDS systems to magnetic filters and anti-corrosion chemicals.
Our goal is to innovate and improve our products and services to help the UK reach net zero targets and to influence the market to drive towards future best practices and systems. With recent Part L building regulations updates, the steppingstone to the Future Homes Standard arriving in 2025, the heating of homes has suddenly become possibly the single biggest challenge facing UK housing developers and housing providers. The next few years will see the most fundamental change in heating domestic properties since gas boilers and steel radiators became commonplace during the late 1970’s and 80’s. Gas is being phased out as an energy source and heat pumps are being pushed by the government as a more sustainable electric heat source. This leads to opportunities for new and different heat emitters to be explored as heating solutions such as Underfloor Heating. This focus on decarbonisation is leading to a much higher level of insulation as standard in new build homes, which runs a very real risk of the challenge to heat homes quickly become a challenge to keep homes cool, particularly with record summer temperatures being regularly broken and expected to continue to get hotter. For this reason, heating and cooling must be considered in tandem in order to provide truly better homes for the future.
I am therefore joining the BMBI Experts panel to provide a specific focus on heating and cooling while we work together as an industry to provide solutions to this challenge. At Genuit we have ready-made complete solutions to heating and cooling of homes and we will continue to invest in renewable technologies to drive sustainable living.
Visit: www.polypipe.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/polypipe/
Twitter: @PolypipeTrade
Launched in 2015, the award winning monthly Builders Merchant Building Index (BMBI) report is the only reliable measure of repair, maintenance & improvement (RMI) activity in the UK. Filling an important gap, it can be widely used in construction, and by economists, Government, national media, commentators and influencers outside the industry.
Polypipe Comment: Q3 2024
In Q3 2024 the construction industry looked for tangible short-medium term government assistance to boost the supply and demand of residential home building. For example, some quick win stimuli to boost home building driven through stamp duty, or additional first-time buyer support to help increase demand. This did not materialise and, instead, we got increases in National Living Wage and National Insurance contributions. There are however some positive signals, around planning and land release for future home building, which should set up an increase in medium-long term home building.
In my last comments for the BMBI, I called for stability in the UK economy following four years of volatility and unpredictability. This has been one of the positives in 2024 so far. With inflation stabilising this has driven a reduction in interest rates. Stability is important to allow all parts of the housing delivery supply network to finally re-base themselves and start to work on affecting meaningful positive change via collaboration and partnerships. Polypipe Building Products’ customers have started to benefit from the fruits of our efforts to strike up real partnerships with like-minded and strategically aligned businesses. Establishing close, direct connections between support functions of our respective businesses has been a foundation step to engraining the voice of the customer, and a problem-solving culture, into everything we do.
A key focus for Q4 2024 and 2025 will be ensuring that we, and our partners, are fully prepared for growth. Despite the lack of short-term support for growth, the government has consistently reiterated targets for housing delivery to increase substantially to 300,000 homes a year. To do this, all stakeholders in the home building supply chain must have actionable plans in place to expand output to meet potential future demand. Working together with customers to innovate and modernise is a key enabler for growth, and Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) is one of those keys. Be it via offsite construction, pre-assembled parts, optimised design, or improving on-site processes, the opportunity to revolutionise UK construction is vast. Polypipe Building Products will be front and centre of the MMC movement to create sustainable living… faster, and more of it!