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Suppliers selected for £100m social housing ‘disruptors’ framework
Suppliers have been selected for a new £100m innovation framework that has been set up to help housing associations tackle a “perfect storm” of challenges over the next 12 months.
The Social Housing Emerging Disruptors (SHED) framework has been set up by Procurement for Housing (PfH), and includes 18 suppliers.
PfH said it launched SHED to help insert ingenuity into supply chains and deliver better outcomes for social housing tenants.
Working alongside the Proptech Innovation Network, PfH found suppliers it considers to be at the cutting edge of housing technology solutions and service design, including those related to decarbonisation and others using blockchain technologies.
The framework provider said the various challenges facing the sector, including the coronavirus pandemic, material and skills shortages and a surge in demand around net zero and fire safety works, are forcing organisations to search for fresh solutions to competing strategic objectives.
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A supplier-focused approach was needed as current public sector regulations do not support the procurement of innovation, PfH added.
This is because the process is built on the premise that buyers know the products or services they want, which is not always the case, it said.
Neil Butters, head of procurement at PfH, said that housing associations often struggle to buy the innovative services they need because of public procurement regulations that have not kept pace with the “perfect storm of challenges” the sector faces.
He said: “The government is currently changing public procurement rules, but that reform might not come into force until 2023 at the earliest. We wanted to be brave and unpick the challenges around procuring innovation, which is still a fairly intangible, transient category of goods and services. It was important we did that here and now for the sector, rather than sitting on our hands – no one else is really tackling it.”
One supplier, Bimdl, provides blockchain-backed building information management solutions.
Leon Tatlock, founder and chief executive of Bimdl, said: “Bimdl are very excited to work alongside the members and Procurement for Housing team to elicit change and democratise technology and data so that collectively we can make the environmental, social and economic gains which the sector is in much need of.”
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