Travis Perkins joins CHIC materials framework

Travis Perkins Managed Services has secured a place on the Communities and Housing Investment Consortium’s latest Merchants Framework, extending its route into materials supply, managed stores, and repair and maintenance support for social landlords.

Following the tender process, TPMS has been appointed across general construction, plumbing, hire, and managed stores categories. The business already supplies housing associations and local authorities through the wider Travis Perkins network, combining physical materials distribution with dedicated stores, digital purchasing tools, and stock management services.

CHIC developed the framework with Efficiency North to give social landlords a compliant route to procure building materials and related merchant services for responsive repairs, planned investment, retrofit, and compliance work. Its scope includes plumbing, electrical products, general building materials, managed stores, painting and decorating, specialist merchants, tools, hire, waste management, retrofit materials, and van stock software.

The framework is intended to address a familiar set of maintenance problems: volatile material costs, inconsistent pricing, supply reliability, and limited visibility of what individual repair teams are buying. CHIC combines merchant access with catalogue management, purchasing reports, and benchmarked pricing so members can compare spend and identify alternatives where appropriate.

For TPMS, the appointment places those procurement functions alongside the national Travis Perkins branch network. The managed services business can support dedicated branches, counter supply, delivered materials, and managed store arrangements, as well as digital services intended to give landlords greater visibility of stock use and purchasing patterns.

The practical value of a materials framework is determined less by the number of products listed than by whether operatives can obtain the right item when they need it. Responsive repairs are particularly sensitive to that issue because a missing component can turn one property visit into two, extending resident disruption and increasing labour, vehicle, and administrative costs even when the material itself is inexpensive.

Managed stores and van stock systems are intended to remove some of that friction by placing commonly used products closer to the workforce and improving replenishment data. The trade-off is that landlords need stronger controls over catalogue selection, minimum and maximum stock levels, substitutions, and obsolete products. A large merchant network can improve availability, but without usable purchasing data it can also spread stock across more locations without solving the underlying planning problem.

Social housing maintenance is also moving towards more varied materials demand. Traditional repairs now sit alongside damp and mould interventions, fire and building safety requirements, energy efficiency upgrades, ventilation work, and larger retrofit programmes. That broadens the catalogue while increasing the importance of specification control, particularly where apparently similar products may not be interchangeable within a tested system or funded retrofit design.

CHIC’s framework structure reflects that change by extending beyond basic merchant supply into specialist and retrofit materials, hire, waste, and software. Separating those lots gives members the option to build a procurement model around their existing operating structure rather than forcing every landlord into the same one-stop arrangement.

TPMS has operated as a specialist managed services business since 2004, with a long-standing focus on the repair and maintenance needs of housing providers. Its current offer combines procurement, materials supply, local fulfilment, and digital management, placing the business between the merchant counter and the landlord’s maintenance operation.

That position means service performance depends on logistics and data as much as on unit prices. If stock levels are poorly set, operatives still lose time. If catalogues are too broad, procurement becomes harder to control. If substitution rules are weak, product compliance can be compromised. The merchant relationship therefore has to be managed as part of the maintenance process rather than as a simple purchasing contract.

The framework appointment also arrives as social landlords face tighter expectations around housing condition and response times. Materials procurement cannot resolve those pressures on its own, but delays or poor stock visibility can undermine otherwise well-planned repairs programmes. Across thousands of homes, small inefficiencies repeated across every operative and every van become substantial operating costs.

The more important delivery test will come when individual landlords call the framework off. Branch coverage, catalogue discipline, managed store design, delivery performance, and purchasing data will determine whether the arrangement reduces repair friction or merely changes the route through which materials are bought. For housing maintenance teams, procurement only becomes useful when it keeps operatives productive at the property rather than at the merchant counter.