LHC JOHN SKIVINGTON
ACCELERATING OFFSITE
It may not feel like it but procurement specialist LHC has been around for 50 years – stretching all the way back to include 1966 – the last year the UK managed to build 300,000 plus homes.
LHC is leading the way in connecting public sector to the world of offsite construction. Gary Ramsay spoke to Director John Skivington about exciting times ahead for the organisation and why offsite manufacture is high on its list of priorities.
For those unfamiliar with what LHC does, the organisation delivers a ‘simple core service’ that brings buyers and suppliers closer together to streamline the delivery of refurbished and hew housing. “We are a not-forprofit, public procurement consortium that helps local authorities, housing associations and registered social landlords with their procurement activity,” says John. “Our overall aim has always been to improve the quality of housing but our mission today is also to work with our clients to help them procure more efficiently and our procurement frameworks have been designed to streamline the process.” The frameworks develop a best practice specification that allows local authorities and housing associations to access better products and suppliers across the entire construction supply chain. “We establish contracts – or the frameworks – on aggregated demand,” says John. “That large collaborative, volume demand enables us to identify the best solutions and specifications for our clients, so that they can access contractors directly without having to go through the whole exercise themselves.” LHC’s NH1 framework came out in 2014 and is specifically for newbuild offsite housing. After being involved for many years in refurbishment and improving existing housing stock, LHC are working with clients starting to think about increasing their own housing supply. “That’s what lead us to develop the NH1 framework,” adds John. “Local authorities, councils and housing associations all recognised they needed to build more themselves. It was very clear. So we were asked to put together a specific offsite framework so they could access a range of factory-made solutions.”
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WWW.OFFSITEMAGAZINE.CO.UK | SPRING 2017
Offsite has never seemed so popular. The Government’s housing white paper – Fixing our Broken Housing Market – was published in February, essentially outlining how the Government hopes to solve a problem that has been generations in the making. It was hugely encouraging to see that offsite construction and factory controlled manufacture were