Procurement’s Untapped Power in Social Housing

The launch of the Procurement Intelligence Hub here at Healthy Homes Hub signals a shift in how the housing sector approaches procurement, from compliance exercise to strategic tool for delivering healthier homes.

At a glance

•       Procurement engaged late in the process routinely produces solutions that fail to match the operational realities of housing delivery.

•       The Procurement Act 2023 introduces mandatory KPI transparency on contracts above specified thresholds, creating sector-wide accountability for outcomes rather than process compliance.

•       The Procurement Intelligence Hub launches as a resource sharing specifications, case studies and hard-won lessons, with the explicit aim of stopping housing providers repeating avoidable mistakes.

Strategic procurement in social housing is underused. Where procurement teams are brought in at the final stages of planning, the result is frequently a mismatch between what the market delivers and what an organisation actually needs. Early involvement, by contrast, allows procurement to shape the solutioning from the outset, ensuring that detailed operational requirements, resident communication plans and delivery logistics are built into the specification before the market is approached.

The consequences of late engagement are well documented within CHIC’s own caseload. Kitchens and bathrooms programmes, for example, have reached mobilisation only to reveal that the proposed delivery model does not suit the housing association’s structure or resident needs. The discipline of asking granular questions before going to market, about throughput, resident engagement and site-specific logistics, is what separates procurement that delivers from procurement that merely complies.

Resident involvement in procurement has declined sharply over the past 15 to 20 years. Where contractor selection once routinely included resident panels at interview stage, that practice has largely disappeared. Other public sectors, notably the NHS in its estates procurement, maintain strong end-user engagement by designing solutions around how people actually need to use buildings. The housing sector is beginning to recover some of this ground through early engagement in retrofit and decarbonisation programmes, but the approach remains narrower than it should be across the full asset management agenda.

The Procurement Act 2023 is reshaping behaviours. Contracts above certain values now require embedded KPIs to be reported openly, introducing a transparency obligation that did not exist under previous legislation. Where KPIs are actively managed and used to drive future improvement rather than simply recorded, the Act has the potential to shift the sector toward genuine outcome accountability. Separately, the Act enables frameworks to be structured around commercial models rather than fixed price lists, allowing call-offs to be priced on the actual merits of individual projects. CHIC’s open-book Healthy Home decarbonisation framework, in which supply chain profit and overhead are fixed contractually while project costs are assessed per scheme, is one operational example of this approach.

Social value measurement remains an area of underperformance. Commitments made at procurement stage are frequently not carried through into delivery, as operational teams managing the works lack the time or mandate to track outcomes. CHIC’s model, requiring a minimum of one per cent of contract value to be spent on social value outcomes, monitored by a dedicated social value manager and measured using the HACT framework, illustrates what systematic accountability can look like in practice. The Procurement Intelligence Hub is intended to make this kind of structured learning available more widely, enabling members to access specifications, case studies and guidance that reflect what has and has not worked across the sector.

Practical steps for housing providers

•       Involve procurement teams at the start of asset management planning, not after a service or programme has already been scoped internally.

•       Before going to market, document the micro-level detail of what delivery requires, including resident communication plans, site logistics and internal approval processes.

•       Review how resident engagement is currently built into procurement processes and consider whether panel involvement at contractor selection stage is achievable for higher-impact services.

•       Assess whether existing frameworks allow annual price refreshes or open-book commercial models, and whether the structure remains fit for purpose under the Procurement Act 2023.

•       Ensure KPIs in contracts are actively managed and used to inform improvement, rather than recorded retrospectively without consequence.

•       Build social value commitments into contract management from day one, assigning clear responsibility for monitoring and measurement to a named individual or team.

•       Use the Procurement Intelligence Hub as a resource for accessing tested specifications and sector learning, and consider contributing insights from your own programmes to support wider sharing.

Host: Andy Cameron-Smith, Communications and Partnerships Director, Healthy Homes Hub

Guest: Luke Hurd, Chief Operating Officer, CHIC

Narrative insight – CHIC Ltd

CHIC identifies procurement intelligence as the bridge between two areas it operates across, the frameworks through which works are commissioned, and the data and performance evidence that should be shaping what gets commissioned, when, and to what standard. Its argument that the sector is data-rich but not intelligence-rich underpins its rationale for supporting the new Procurement Intelligence Hub, alongside a view that specifications, supply chain insight and lessons from delivery should be shared openly rather than held as organisational IP.