What will drive the window and door industry in the second half of 2024?

Darren Woodcock , the new General Manager of Deceuninck in the UK and Ireland, discusses the key challenges and opportunities for the UK and Irish window, door and construction industries in 2024.

This year has presented challenges for everyone. Generally, the market has been tough as households have struggled with inflation and higher costs.

We and our customers have successfully ridden those challenges and looking forward to the second half of this year, our research suggests that we’re going to see a release of latent demand, albeit on the proviso that inflation continues to fall and we get that cut in interest rates.

It’s important that we see this in the context of shorter-term influences on our industry and construction more widely. The bigger challenges - but also opportunities - are about much longer-term trends.

Growing confidence in the housing market

According to Savills, average house prices have increased by 1.1% this year, significantly outperforming expectations, with forecasts of a 2.5% increase overall.

This recovery has been underpinned by an easing of mortgage prices, despite the bank rate persistently sitting at 5.25%.

Inflation fell to 2.3% in April, down from 3.2% in March, which increases pressure on the Bank of England to introduce a cut, which at the very least should give households more cash in their pockets and confidence to invest in home improvements.

Independent research commissioned by us earlier this year and conducted by YouGov, suggests that many homeowners (almost a third), delayed spend because of the cost-of-living crisis.

Confidence in property values, combined with increased spending power is likely to drive increased spending in the second half of this year.

Unblocking planning

A key challenge for the next government will be to unblock our planning system.

The backlog in the planning process, is one of the main obstacles to the delivery of new homes, with government figures showing that only 21 per cent of major applications were processed in the statutory 13-week period over the past year. This compares to 57% 10-years ago.

This directly translates into lower approvals and fewer new build starts - something which has artificially supressed activity in the new build sector but more importantly, impacts the delivery of properties, ultimately making the housing market unsustainable.

The system isn’t working for industry, it’s not working for housebuilders or homeowners, and it needs to change.

The Construction skills shortage

Another area of challenge is the skills gap. Skilled construction workers are thin on the ground.

According to the Construction Skills Network (CSN), a further 266,000 workers will be needed to meet projected UK construction demand by 2026, with carpenters, joiners and construction managers among the positions most in demand.

It makes retention of quality people key and creates a clear pressure in the commercial space.

You can have the most detailed designs and specifications - but ultimately, if building products aren’t installed to those specifications, they aren’t going to perform.

It’s vital that industry and government come together to make construction and manufacturing viable career choices for young people.

Sustainability will define the UK window and door industry in the next decade.

Our research shows that more than two-thirds of end-users (68%) would choose windows and doors with a higher recycled content over and above products that don’t contain recycled content, or which did so at lower levels.

Lowering their carbon footprint has an impact on the purchasing decisions of more than 70% of homeowners. In the commercial space its already a pre-requisite.

Sustainability is about energy efficiency and the pivotal part that collectively as an industry we can play in lowering UK energy consumption and homeowner bills.

Deceuninck has established a lead on sustainability based on our commitment to the Science Based Targets (SBTi) programme, with a headline pledge to cut the CO2 emissions from its own operations (Scope 1&2) by 60% by 2030 from a 2021 baseline.

We’re doing this through our pioneering recycling programme and the commitment we have made to lower our operational carbon footprint.

We’ve also invested more than six-figures in 2500 solar panels which were installed on the roof of our Calne manufacturing facility earlier this year. These will generate a total of 895,762 kWh of clean energy per year, reducing CO2 emissions by 498,507kg per annum.

We’ve also added two new chillers to our operation, delivering a 50% reduction in energy usage. These are important steps in making our business greener – and by default the products our customers manufacture and sell.

Future Homes less than 12-months away?

While it is likely that the general election will push back publication of the new Future Homes Standard, the direction of travel is clear.

Although consultation suggests a watered-down target of 1.2W/m2K for new build windows is likely (as opposed to the 0.8 W/m2K industry had expected), the new standard may still deliver big changes from next year.

This is because the proposed Home Energy Model will deliver a move away from the stand window model to modelling each specific window configuration.

That creates a challenge because most of windows supplied in a real-world context are smaller than the ‘standard’ window configuration (1230x1480 open/fixed), which means the glass area is smaller and the u-value likely to be higher.

Fabricators in the commercial space will have to adjust to this new assessment and guarantee product performance.

Product development

We’re one of a handful of UK window and door systems companies to already have the capability to deliver advanced levels of thermal performance.

Elegant our next generation window, for example, delivers a step change in performance achieving U-values as low as 0.8W/m2K.

Forming a key element of our wider sustainability strategy, it’s a next generation fiberglass composite window system with contemporary minimalist features.

These replicate aluminium in an advanced, low maintenance and energy efficient, composite system and can also be combined with Decoroc, our next generation finish, so fitted alongside aluminium products as part of dual-specification installations.

It’s indicative of the future direction of product development, we are going to have to reassess as a sector how we deliver new homes and that includes the performance and processes involved in the manufacture of building products and the components within them.

Concluding thoughts

The direction of travel is pretty much one way. Societally we have some big commitments to make and if we don’t build more new houses more sustainably – or retrofit them – we aren’t going to make them.

That generates opportunities for window and door manufacturers and installation specialists working across commercial and home improvement sectors.

Stability of supply, flexibility in product offer, particularly foils and colour - but most importantly, the right sustainability credentials, are going to be key in driving future growth.

For more information about Deceuninck, call 01249 816 969, email [email protected]? or visit www.deceuninck.co.uk