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: Q1 2025
Quarter 1 2025 has been another UK residential construction quarter best described as ‘in recovery’ rather than recovered. Most green shoots of recovery we have experienced in the last two years have been disrupted by geopolitical events. This quarter it has largely been international tariffs which have caused further economic uncertainty.
UK Housing starts, as well as brick deliveries and other market metrics, which as often used as barometers for housing growth, are positive year-to-date compared with the same period in 2024. However, the start of 2024 was still in a trough of construction activity after the spike in foundations put in around the Part L Building Regulations change in the summer of 2023. But, despite many individual market measures showing strong growth, actual activity levels generally are subdued, although tracking slowly in the right direction.
Since the COVID pandemic in 2020, most reliable market metrics have become detached from previous correlations, and data analysis has become more of an artform than a science to generate insight.
Polypipe Building Products has therefore started collaborating and sharing data with our strategic partners to provide them and us with greater insight, including more qualitative information to drive the voice of the customer within our businesses.
The Construction Products Reform Green Paper (Construction Products Reform Green Paper – GOV.UK) was released in February 2025, with data fundamentally at the heart of all recommendations for improvements and ultimately safety. Polypipe has the most comprehensive range of third-party approvals in the UK plastic plumbing and drainage market. Quality and transparency of both physical products, and the related data to support this, is at the core of our business and will continue to be. House builders and homeowners are rightly becoming more demanding in terms of proving that quality, sustainability and safety standards not only meet today’s requirements, but are futureproofed. Polypipe fully supports the industry’s transition to data-based construction product requirements (www.polypipe.com/housing) and we will be at the forefront of this collective industry effort.