In our member profile series, we ask housing associations and local authorities why they joined Building Better. Find out about their drivers, their challenges, and their plans for the future.
Platform Housing Group
Platform Housing is the largest housing association in the Midlands and one of the biggest in the country, owning and managing 46,000 homes. Over the last two years, they have built more social and affordable homes in England than any other social housing provider. As a strategic partner for Homes England, they’ve made a commitment to delivering 25% of their programme via modern methods of construction (MMC).
Why did you join Building Better?
Platform is the result of the 2018 merger between Fortis Living and Waterloo Housing Group in the Midlands. Our corporate strategy set out our roadmap to building a truly modern housing association and our commitments to MMC and sustainability are a critical part of that journey. We knew that collaboration would be fundamental to delivering on these and it was a no brainer for us to join Building Better – it’s a great place to find partners, data and knowledge.
Whilst we are very ambitious around MMC, we don’t have a huge amount of experience. So we’re very much in ‘listen and learn’ mode. Building Better lets us access a unique group of registered providers who have more experience in MMC than we do. That cross-sector collaboration is really valuable.
What are your drivers behind MMC?
Our chief executive is chair of the NHF’s Sustainability Strategy Group and as a business, sustainability is one of our founding principles. With asset management, we’re working on a dedicated sustainability and retrofit strategy. With development, we’ve got to ensure that all the homes we build are sustainable, and that’s not just about environmental sustainability, it’s about sustainability of tenure too.
We’ve been exploring how we can build homes of such good design and build quality that they offer a greater sense of wellbeing and comfort to customers. While enhancing our customer experience is absolutely our priority, there’s also a financial upside to building high quality, high performing homes. If a fabric first approach secures lower energy bills, we reduce the financial impact on our customers and they might be more able to pay their rent and sustain their tenancies for longer, particularly with the current cost of living crisis.
If you put all of those things together, you recognise the economic value that is created too. Improving the relationship between the home and the person may lead to less voids and then there’s the lower life cycle cost of a high quality, fabric first
approach.
What MMC schemes are you developing?
We have one site in Boston, Lincolnshire where GreenSquareAccord are delivering 41 MMC houses for us. We were using another contractor for some of the homes, but they went into administration. That’s one of the risks that registered providers are often concerned about: MMC manufacturers going bust mid-construction. Luckily LoCal Homes stepped in and are able to deliver the full scheme with a combination of their Eco 100 and Eco 200 systems.
How many MMC homes are you planning to develop?
We’ve just joined Building Better, and our plan is to quickly use the framework or the DPS to deliver 100 homes across three different sites – in Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire.
As a Homes England strategic partner, we’ll be delivering 25% of our programme via MMC so we’ll be developing many more offsite homes in the months and years to come. We’re currently thinking about what Category systems to use.
We’ve been doing a piece of work internally called the Platform Standard. It’s about how we can most effectively deliver good quality, affordable homes for our customers, and on the development side, that’s involved us developing a series of house types and floor plans with an architect. We think we could deliver these existing house type designs using Category 2 systems.
The next phase of the project will be developing a specification for our Platform Standard that is based more on performance and experience, rather than existing designs, so that doesn’t rule out Category 1 either.
Our land team are now reviewing our pipeline for existing schemes and also our legacy land to see if any would be appropriate for MMC.
What would you say to other housing providers thinking about joining Building Better?
We’re hyper aware that as a housing association we have to be responsible with how we’re spending money. But equally, we can’t afford, in the MMC space, for housing associations to continue holding their breath and waiting to see what happens.
Some housing providers have to be torch bearers. Once we get to a critical mass and the balance tips we’ll begin to realise true time savings and economies of scale, but it does require enough of us to step into the arena and work with manufacturers.
That’s what Building Better is about for me. It gives you comfort to walk down the MMC road because you know you’re not alone.
Katie Gilmartin is head of business development and innovation at Platform Housing Group
15 July 2022
Membership of Building Better is open to any housing association or local authority housing provider in England and Wales.
