IN Brief:
- Travis Perkins Managed Services has been appointed by Wandle Housing Association as its new building materials supplier.
- The contract will support repairs and maintenance across 7,000 properties in nine south London boroughs.
- TPgo Data will be used to track purchasing, product availability, and future van stock profiles.
Travis Perkins Managed Services has been appointed as Wandle Housing Association’s new building materials supplier, supporting repairs and maintenance across a 7,000-home portfolio in south London.
The contract will see TPMS supply materials primarily through Travis Perkins branches in Croydon and Peckham, with a further seven branches supporting stock availability across the wider operating area. The arrangement gives Wandle’s repairs teams access to a broad range of products at short notice across homes in nine boroughs.
Alongside branch supply, the partnership includes use of TPgo Data, the TPMS platform that provides purchasing insight, product tracking, and analysis of material use. Wandle will use the system to monitor where operatives are buying products, identify demand patterns, and improve availability for first-time repairs.
The housing association has been working with management consultants Lumensol to improve its repairs management systems. TPgo Data will support that work by giving Wandle clearer visibility of product demand, branch activity, and purchasing behaviour across its estate.
The agreement was awarded through the Cirrus Framework, which provides a procurement route for local authorities, NHS trusts, schools, universities, registered charities, and social housing providers to access building materials and related supplies.
A phased rollout is planned. Travis Perkins and Wandle will analyse the most frequently purchased products before developing van stock profiles, with TPgo Van Stock expected to follow. The system is designed to help operatives carry the products they use most often, reducing avoidable branch trips and improving the likelihood that common repairs can be completed on the first visit.
Housing repairs are increasingly being shaped by data, availability, and resident communication rather than materials supply alone. Landlords are under pressure to improve response times, demonstrate value for money, reduce complaints, and strengthen compliance across ageing and dispersed housing stock. That is changing the role of merchants, which are now expected to support stock planning, reporting, and operational efficiency as well as product supply.
The same shift is visible in larger housing works programmes, including The Guinness Partnership’s £1bn contractor appointments covering planned maintenance, fire safety, retrofit, and regional delivery. Wandle’s agreement is more focused on materials and repairs, but it sits within the same move towards more structured estate delivery.
The data element gives the contract much of its operational value. Repairs operations often lose efficiency through small, repeated failures: missing parts, inconsistent substitutions, poor visibility of branch spend, vans stocked without evidence of demand, and operatives losing time to additional collections. Across thousands of properties, those failures translate into cost, programme delay, carbon, and resident dissatisfaction.
Material availability also affects sustainability. Every avoidable trip to collect parts adds mileage, fuel use, and labour time. Every failed first-time fix extends the repair cycle and increases pressure on scheduling teams. Better stock profiling will not remove every inefficiency, but it gives repairs teams a stronger basis for planning around real product demand.
The appointment also shows how merchants are developing their managed services offer. Price and network coverage remain important, but social housing and public-sector clients increasingly expect compliance support, data insight, procurement reporting, framework access, and social value alongside product supply.
For Wandle, the contract will be judged through practical operational measures: product availability, first-time fix rates, cost visibility, operative efficiency, and resident experience. Materials procurement now sits much closer to housing performance than it once did.
