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 2023
With the house building market in a particularly difficult position, performance in Q3 has been challenging for its suppliers, with volumes relatively flat. Consumer confidence improved throughout Q3 but in the medium term housing supply, held back particularly by planning approvals, is a far bigger problem than reduced housing demand caused by economic conditions.
The planning system has been described as “the worst it has ever been” by those who have worked in and around it for decades. Getting new housing plans approved is more difficult than ever, at a time when the UK needs new housing and the economic stimulus from it so desperately.
It’s impossible to overestimate the effect of climate change on the housebuilding industry, but for us at Genuit, climate is both an opportunity and a risk. Brought on by climate change, increasingly heavy rainfall and colder winters affect demand for plastic drainage products, storm and flood management, and heating systems for domestic properties requiring repair, maintenance or improvement. Similarly, increasingly hotter summers present opportunities for irrigation systems and cooling solutions, a market the UK has traditionally not needed to think much about.
Short term however, increasingly extreme weather impacts the housing supply chain. Heavy rainfall with localised flooding, or extremely cold temperatures which freeze the ground solid often bring housing construction to an immediate halt as groundworks cannot continue. That then delays demand for first and second-fix products: first fix being products used before the walls are plastered, and second fix the visible fittings and products such as flooring and tiling.
The future of housing supply in the UK must be focused on sustainable living. That’s a requirement and a duty on us all to protect the planet. It’s already causing us to fundamentally change the way we think about building, and improving housing from a carbon usage and content perspective. The additional challenge of the journey to net zero is to remember that the environment we’re aiming to protect is itself changing. The UK will continue to get more extreme weather, and our housing supply must flex to accommodate it to ensure we’re providing housing which is fit for the future.