Not so long ago if someone called you disruptive you knew they were not paying you a compliment. But today if you are disruptive you can wear that badge with pride because ‘disruptors’ are the innovators, the people with the bright ideas, challenging the status quo and changing the world.
They are also very often lone voices, easily drowned out by the established players that dominate whatever field of endeavour it is that they want to disrupt.
This is nowhere more true than in the field of public sector procurement where the status quo still holds sway.
But just over a year ago, in January 2022, an organisation called Procurement for Housing (PfH) launched a new procurement framework for the social housing sector that specifically targets disruptive technologies.
Procurement for Housing was set up in 2004 by the National Housing Federation, Chartered Institute for Housing and HouseMark. Last year it procured around £320m-worth of goods and services for over 900 UK social housing landlords.
The framework is called the Social Housing Emerging Disruptors (SHED for short) and helps social landlords to procure non-traditional solutions compliantly from micro-businesses and SMEs – many of them focused on construction and retrofitting homes.
Inspiration for SHED was provided by the Proptech Innovation Network (PIN) – a specialist subset of the Disruptive Innovators Network (DIN), which describes itself as “a membership organisation for social housing providers investing in innovation” and whose mission is “to enable members to make sense of disruption, be more innovative and grab the opportunities to build back better and maximise their social impact”.
Jenny Danson, director of the Proptech Innovation Network, says: “It can take a huge amount of effort to bring innovation into social housing. Suppliers and housing providers have to jump through hoops to satisfy procurement regulations – it often involves lots of effort and cost.
“That’s why we developed the SHED with PfH – it gives social landlords a route to compliantly procure solutions quicker and cheaper, and suppliers have the certainty of being on the framework for three years and they receive support to break into the sector.”
SHED is one of more than 20 procurement frameworks operated by PfH. SHED1 runs until the middle of December this year; SHED2, launched in January, runs until 2nd January 2026.
Worth up to £100m over the next three years, SHED2 has 20 suppliers, nearly all of them SMEs. “Our framework is mainly targeting SMEs and startups, but we don’t specifically exclude anyone,” says Neil Butters, head of procurement at PfH. “British Gas is one of our suppliers; the only benchmark is innovation,” he explains.
Nevertheless, most of the suppliers are small outfits and, for them, a framework like SHED provides an invaluable foot in the door.
Public sector procurement has traditionally been seen as a barrier to innovation, introducing processes and bureaucracy that make it harder to buy emerging technologies from entrepreneurial SMEs and micro-organisations. Fledgling suppliers are unable to scale their solutions and invest in further innovation because buying teams are unable to procure services compliantly under existing rules.
“To get on most public sector frameworks you need to satisfy stringent requirements relating to trading history, compliance and so on,” says Butters. “That often precludes SMEs.”
Procurement for Housing has set up a dedicated SHED portal that will enable housing providers to conduct a desk-based supplier selection process. The portal will identify the supplier that can best meet their needs and PfH’s procurement team will provide pricing information and support the contracting process.
One of the first companies to join SHED1 last year was Rubixx, which has developed a cloud-based housing management software system that looks after everything from occupancy and planned maintenance to health & safety compliance, finance and document management.
Rubixx group director Simon Reay says he wasn’t interested when he first heard about SHED. “I didn’t know what a framework was,” he admits. “I thought it was probably just cheap stationery.
“It looked like a lot of paperwork but my team kept saying ‘we’ve got to get on it’,” he says. And now he’s glad he did: “We’ve already won two big contracts, for Trust Housing in Edinburgh and the Salvation Army Housing Association, and there are two more in the offing,” he says.
“I was quite surprised: one contract is for 5,000 units and the other for 2,000. These are meaty deals,” says Reay. “We’ve won huge amounts of work through SHED.”
The framework has been such a success for Rubixx that Reay says he’s now walking away from tendered work. In a lengthy post on the LinkedIn social media site, Reay explained why he recently withdrew from one tender: “The size of tender process was suited to a large housing association or local authority but the client was just over 1,000 units. We don’t have enough fat built into our contracts to absorb that level of admin and risk.”
Rubixx is a small company – Reay has 12 members of staff – and it operates in a market that is dominated by half a dozen big legacy suppliers. He cannot devote huge amounts of time responding to tenders.
“For £10,000 a year of work I’m not going to spend 60 hours doing the paperwork,” he declares. Tellingly, he says that when bidding through the SHED framework, Rubixx was described by one client as “suspiciously cheap”.
“Another client spoke to us and said ‘we’re interested but we’re going to go out to tender’. So I said, ‘then I’ll have to up the price by 40%’. They came straight back and said ‘are you on any frameworks?’.”
Rubixx is not alone in facing obstacles when tendering for jobs. “Our SMEs are mostly micro-SMEs – people who are juggling a lot of balls and sometimes don’t have the bandwidth to get up to speed,” says Butters.
“They might spend a lot of time and energy knocking on doors to find a partner to pilot their idea but in the end they reach a financial threshold and can’t scale it up. They go to a local authority but the local authority doesn’t know what to do with them so they go out to the private sector – and the public sector misses out.”
Most of the startups on SHED have identified a specific problem, says Butters, and some are offering entirely new technologies.
Ambue’s 3D building model, for example, helps social landlords to understand sustainability, energy efficiency and heat loss improvement opportunities.
Bays Consulting’s dashboard provides housing organisations with stock condition predictions related to home hazards and health risks.
And PH Jones will enable social landlords to create virtual power plants of the future from the domestic batteries and renewable energy solutions that they install in their homes, so they can provide stored energy during periods of peak demand.
Another of last year’s successful SHED1 companies is XMReality, a Swedish firm that uses augmented reality (AR) to enable landlords to offer tenants remote trouble-shooting support.
Unlike some of the SMEs on the SHED framework, XMReality’s system is already proven, albeit not in the social housing sector.
“It was a Swedish government-funded project originally for the military,” says Johanna Edepil, XMReality’s chief marketing officer. “It is like first-aid for industry – for when something goes wrong and you need eyes on-site.”
The technology has already been deployed in various industrial applications, such as manufacturing and food & drink. The first UK social housing landlord to adopt the technology was the Kingdom Housing Association, based in Glenrothes, which has been using XMReality since 2021.
Since XMReality joined the SHED framework, other housing associations have followed in Kingdom’s footsteps, including Sovereign Housing Association and Cobalt Housing. “The UK is the first market where we’ve served this sector,” says Edepil.
For social housing landlords with thousands of units to maintain, reactive maintenance can be very costly and time-consuming – especially if you have to send someone out in a van to check a dodgy boiler late at night.
Feedback from users has been encouraging, says Edepil: “Sovereign carried out a pilot project that involved a lot of measuring and they found that they were able to move almost a third of their tickets to remote. That represents a good return on investment. And it’s good for their environmental footprint,” she says.
Edepil says XMReality has found the SHED framework to be a boon. “It’s an efficient way to increase our visibility. We like the fact that it’s easy and transparent and it gives us validation.
“Social housing is a big growth area now; but in 2020 it wasn’t even on our radar,” she adds.
Butters says that, with rising energy costs and growing pressure to reduce carbon emissions, he assumed that SHED2 would be focusing on net zero. But many of the chosen suppliers also provide services designed to empower and engage tenants, in acknowledgement of new tenant satisfaction standards that come into effect from next month.
“There’s a lot about ‘digital inclusion’ and efforts to minimise problems for vulnerable residents,” says Butters.
He cites Hello Lamp Post as a prime example. This is an interactive text messaging service that gathers views by asking residents to chat with street furniture. There’s also Alertacall, a contact system that creates digital communities in sheltered and supported housing, so tenants feel safe and connected.
“Social landlords are dealing with rising prices, a 7% rent cap and a cost of living crisis, alongside urgent targets on building safety, net zero and development,” says Butters. “They desperately need brand new ideas to tackle these challenges. The SHED framework is a safe space to try out these ideas without complex procurement rules, legal challenges or lengthy tender documents getting in the way.”
Got a story? Email news@theconstructionindex.co.uk
