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: Q4 2023
Quarter 4 2023 will be remembered as the period when house building activity hit a low and bounced back. There was a continuing dearth of housing starts following a stock build in Q2 to potentially avoid the impact of changes to Building Regulations Part L. Part L covers the conservation of fuel and power in new homes in England, and establishes how energy-efficient new and existing homes should be.
Reduced housing demand in 2023 was a testing time for everyone, with more competition chasing less activity. However, there was a softening of the macro factors which contributed to the reduction in house building, such as a deceleration of inflation, interest rate stability and subsequent cuts in mortgage rates among major lenders. Announcement of employee tax cuts and a larger than expected increase in National Living Wage has helped to improve sentiment going into 2024, reflected in improved Consumer Confidence scores. A low of -38 in February 2023 improved to -19 in January, the most positive in two years. It fell back in February to -21. But ‘optimism for our personal financial situation for the next 12 months’, one of the five component measures of GfK’s Confidence Index, registered zero again, having been as low as -18 last February. This is a critical measure because confident householders are more likely to invest in major spending decisions.
There is certainly a lessening pessimism moving into 2024. However, the acid test will be the government’s spring statement, and if there is specific support for the housing market. The most impactful initiative would be to offer first time buyers a meaningful support package, one that stimulates affordability for first time buyers in the new build sector.
The industry needs clarity on how the housebuilding and construction sector is going to tackle upcoming legislative and building safety requirements with The Future Homes Standard due to arrive in June 2025. Cooling and heating of new homes is an ever-evolving area, and 2024 may well be the year when the housing supply industry drives further forward with renewable solutions such as Underfloor Heating and District Heating.