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: Q2 2024
A lot has happened since I wrote my comments for the Q1 BMBI report. We are now in the middle of another US Presidential race, waiting for a new president to be elected, and we’ve seen a change in UK leadership with Labour’s win. Both will affect the UK economy one way or another. At Polypipe Building Products, we’re pleased to hear the Prime Minister and cabinet, and His Majesty King Charles in his recent King’s Speech, pushed planning reform as the key to building more homes. The early noises are promising in that the target is fundamental changes to the National Planning Policy Framework to allow more building on green and grey belt land, as well as reintroducing mandatory targets at a local level. What the UK housing market really needs though is a long-awaited period of consistency and a return to some degree of predictability, which we haven’t had for many years.
The Construction Products Association’s latest forecast for the private and public housing market for this year has been downgraded again, having originally forecast 2024 to be the start of a return to growth in overall activity. What we have seen in H1 2024 is indeed a growth in housing starts, but a much slower and gradual increase than would be required to fully recover from the heavy decline the market experienced in H2 2023.
As a supplier to the housing industry, we believe that partnerships are rapidly becoming an extremely important common theme throughout the whole industry. But the reasons that businesses work with each other in 2024 and beyond is very different to how it has traditionally been. Strategic Partnerships, based on alignment, values and behaviours, joint customer-focused solutioning, data sharing, long-term planning and working with rather than for one another, is proving to be far more valuable in real terms than just a price on a tender document. Polypipe Building Products is eager to grow our Strategic Partnerships to collaborate with customers to deliver sustainable building solutions, which will ultimately make better homes, for more people, more efficiently and sustainably.
What does that look like in practice? See examples of partnering customers to create solutions to create sustainable living here: Case studies | Polypipe