Interview: Seddon Group highlights work in hard-to-treat homes

Housing Industry Leaders spoke to Tony Clark, Regional Director for the Midlands at Seddon Housing Partnerships, a subsidiary of the Seddon Group, on the company’s focus on affordable housing, decarbonisation, and retrofitting in the Midlands region.

Q:  Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and Seddon Housing Partnerships and what you aim to achieve in the Midlands?

A: Originally, I started my career in local government, but I’ve pretty much spent my whole career in the social housing sector…It’s all I’ve ever done.

Seddon Housing Partnerships is the affordable housing part of the Seddon Group, a 127-year-old, fourth-generation family-owned business, which is quite a rarity in the contractor market. There are five workstreams that we offer through Seddon HP which involves new build, planned maintenance, regeneration, compliance and retrofit, which all link in with our business plan: Better Homes: Better Lives. 

Our philosophy as a Group, is that if someone has a decent home, they will hopefully have a decent life too. Our mission fundamentally is to ensure we build great homes or to make existing homes as best as they can be for the people that live in them.

In the Midlands specifically, my business plan has three key objectives: We aim to build resilient relationships with social housing landlords and other key stakeholders in the region, to build a great team internally to deliver the best customer experience, and to ensure we have a sustainable business.

With a big push on sustainability and social value, the Seddon family is genuinely keen to make sure their legacy is a positive one.
 

Q. Have you got any current projects in the Midlands and what are some partnerships that have been crucial in delivering these initiatives?

A: Yeah, so we’ve got three new build jobs on the ground, two of which are due to come to an end at around March/April time and then another new build project, which involves roughly 50 homes down in Nuneaton starting in the summer.

Behind the scenes, there are lots of conversations going on involving six or so additional projects, where we are the preferred bidder.

On the refurbishment and retrofit side, we’ve got a whole host of contracts with various housing associations and local authorities for works such as fire safety compliance.

We are also working on a refurbishment piece for a Housing Association down in Wyre Forest, which involves roofing and cladding replacement, and then new contracts starting in the next couple of months for damp, mold and condensation remediation, and further fire safety works. 

Our partnerships primarily will be with housing associations or local authorities, but we also do our own land finding as well. So, through going out and purchasing land, we will then talk to housing associations that we would like to partner with. 

In terms of our sustainability approach, we also have a joint venture with a waste recycling company, who do an awful lot of work for us around the monitoring and management of waste and where it goes.
 

Q: What are the main challenges that Seddon HP faces in the Midlands region?

A: In the Midlands one of the main challenges we are facing is a skills shortage, particularly while HS2 is being developed. So, what you’re finding in the Midlands at the moment, is that we’re all fishing in that same small pond for expertise.

I think the other challenge is that, because there is a little bit of uncertainty at the moment around the quality of existing social housing homes, rather than focussing too much on building new homes, a lot of landlords have started to cut their development programmes, in favour of spending their income on existing homes. Whilst a challenge, it is also an opportunity for the Seddon business.

Although some of these challenges are not unique to the Midlands, they remain a hurdle to my team in trying to get the business to fully contribute to the challenges currently facing the social housing sector.
 

Q: How are Seddon HP addressing government targets like the EPC level C energy requirements?

A: Seddon has a good track record in working on hard-to-treat homes. For example, when the previous funding regimes were in place, we did a lot of work around external wall insulation. But of course these days, the funding regimes have moved on, as has the technology that we now install. 

While supporting organisations recently on the Wave 3 bids, we recognised the urgency needed to meet government targets and ended up setting up a decarbonisation team. Through this we are offering a consultancy (and remediation) service to organisations that are perhaps not big enough to pay for expensive modelling assessments.

One example of a project was with High Peak in Derbyshire, we offered the consultancy service and modeled what the houses would need , and now we’re currently delivering the work to those 40 homes. 

Alongside this, what we are also doing at the moment is we are putting our resident liaison teams through an NVQ in energy assessment. We also have our own retrofit assessor. This is so that when the RLO’s are out there doing their day job, they are also able to provide support around ways to best manage homes and grant information.
 

Q: How do you see the affordable housing growth in the Midlands over the next five to 10 years? 

A: There’s quite a buoyant mood in the sector at the moment, which is the first for quite a while, and that’s because of the policies of the current government. This includes the push to build 1.5 million new homes over a 5-year period, and monies to retrofit homes so that they are easier to manage and easier to pay bills for. Then you’ve got existing stock, which is probably in some cases, at the end of its useful life. So, there’s a real, pent up demand for work on both new build and on existing homes. 

There are no two ways to go about it, the challenges remain about whether there is ever going to be enough money to do everything that is going to be needed to be done to those homes and estates. But there’s no doubt that over the next five to 10 years, there will be a significant programme of investment that needs to go into social housing stock in a whole host of work types. 

I think you’ve then got the devolution proposal, which the government is keen to roll out, involving in our case the West Midlands Combined Authority. These devolved entities are going to get more power, with more responsibility for delivery at a local level. So, I think, from the Midlands perspective, that’s got to be great for us, as that’s putting the money, power, and policy making, local to where we are. 

So that’s another partnership, another relationship, that everybody must foster, to make sure we all work together for the benefit of the Midlands, and we deliver what needs to be delivered.