18 suppliers have won spots on a Social Housing Emerging Disruptors (SHED) framework, which aims to help social landlords compliantly procure services and technologies to support with retrofit, development and fire safety.
Launched by Procurement for Housing, the framework is worth up to £100m over three years.
Challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, materials and labour shortages and surging demand for low carbon, building safety and development works have forced housing providers to search for alternative solutions to deliver competing strategic objectives.
Neil Butters, Head of Procurement at Procurement for Housing, said: ‘Over the past 12 months, our members have been telling us about the perfect storm of challenges they’re facing with global supply chain disruption, a widespread skills crisis and huge pressure to meet fire safety, net zero and house building targets. There is urgent need for innovation that can help them address these problems, but public procurement regulations just haven’t caught up. Housing providers can’t compliantly buy the innovative services they need.
‘The government is currently changing public procurement rules, but that reform might not come into force until 2023. 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.
‘Many of the suppliers we’ve appointed to the framework are small or micro businesses. We wanted to unlock their services for the social housing sector – these are pioneering, future-thinking organisations, many with a focus on sustainability or building safety. The SHED is about PfH supporting social landlords to identify and adopt innovation that will improve the lives of tenants.’
Procurement for Housing said that public sector procurement has traditionally been seen as a barrier to innovation, making it harder to buy emerging solutions from SMEs and micro-organisations, and making new suppliers unable to scale their solutions and invest in innovation because buying teams cannot procure services compliantly under existing rules.
They hope to address these issues by creating a framework that is flexible, future-proof and not procedure intensive, with a dedicated SHED portal enabling housing providers to conduct a simple desk-based supplier selection process.
The portal will identify the supplier that can best meet a housing provider’s needs and Procurement for Housing’s team will provide pricing and support.
Innovators appointed to the SHED framework include Bimdl, a blockchain-backed building information modelling (BIM) solution, Power Circle Projects, which provides democratised, decentralised low carbon smart energy solutions, and Chameleon Digitization, an organisation using machine learning to spot dangerous gas canisters being taken into high rise buildings.
Photo supplied by Procurement for Housing