Member Article

Manchester’s Procure Plus on disrupting the status quo and its plans to expand

Procure Plus is a social housing regeneration consortium which dedicates itself to the North West region.

It was set up 10 years ago to meet the social housing demand and aimed to pull landlords together and reduce costs while overcoming skills shortages.

Based in Manchester, the consortium ensures the creating of social housing stock runs as smooth as possible by procuring construction materials and contractors for its members and its methods mean contractors have a steady supply of work.

Chief executive of Procure Plus, Mike Brogan spoke to Bdaily he said: “Working in this way ensures we are more organised and it gives contractors the ability to recruit and train people.

“I set it up myself with 10 members, each put in £25k and the government gave £350k giving us an opening balance of £600k which allowed us to recruit staff.

“Our profit goes up each year but we are a not for profit organisation so we give the profit away, a couple of million a year goes to charity.

“We support trainees like plumbers etc and we have 50 employed people at the moment.

“There are two fronts on which we can expand, firstly other organisations want to copy out set up, and we are supporting other regions to copy us, using the same trading platforms and same buyers, sort of a ‘cookie cutter’ system.

“We are also working on new builds in the North West, working with design companies to create modular houses reducing the cost of the houses.

“The intention is to increase the level of supply, this work with new builds should create another 50 jobs in its first year, then another 50 followed by a further 30 a year after that.”

He said, the biggest challenge was that they challenge the market place, going against the status quo and ‘disrupting the old world order.’

He continued: “There aren’t really any easy bits but the most enjoyable bit of my job is making changes and we have got thousands of people into work since we started.

“The personality of the company is cheeky, independent and free spirited, we don’t accept the norm and we expect you to bring yourself, the individual to work and make things better, make a role yours.

“The industry has really changed since we started, because we engage with local SMEs instead of national contractors, we cut out the middleman.

“We engage the supply chain at a different level and deal directly with the roof tiler or the kitchen fitters, which helps local economies as local companies are getting the profits.

Mike’s aspirations are to make sure everyone with a decent income can afford a home.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sophia Taha .