Last updated 27 July 2022
London & Quadrant Housing Trust
The origins of London & Quadrant date back to the foundation in south London in 1963 of Quadrant Housing Association. Six years later, the group merged with the London Housing Trust and has since become a behemoth in the social housing sector with total assets of £13 billion and a management portfolio of more than 118,000 homes.
London & Quadrant is one of the UK’s largest registered social landlords (RSLs) with a development pipeline of nearly 30,000 homes.
Financials
In 2018, turnover broke the billion-pound barrier for the first time as London & Quadrant only to fall back but returned above this level in 2021 and has continued to grow. In the 12 months to March 2022, turnover reached £1,113 million (2021: £1,052 million). The operating surplus reached £315 million (2021: £307 million).
To view the financials for London & Quadrant, visit the group”s website here.
Operations
London & Quadrant have traditionally been the biggest developing RSL in the UK but has faces a challenge as a new affordable homes programme to replaces the old grant regime.
The government has agreed to provide debt guarantees worth up to £10 billion to support the building of new homes for rent in the private and affordable sectors. To meet this challenge, London & Quadrant issued bonds and, in addition to continually growing its surplus, expanded successfully into the commercial sector.
In 2018, London & Quadrant were one of 29 developers appointed to the Greater London Authority’s London Development Panel 2 (LDP2), which can be used by public landowners to develop social housing and is expected to see spending of up to £20 billion over the next four years (Project ID: 17254416).
London & Quadrant is behind the £3.5 billion Barking Riverside development that will deliver 10,800 homes by 2023 (Project ID: 03482310) and a range of other smaller, but still major projects such as the £184 million Silk District scheme in Tower Hamlets (Project ID: 14175889).
In 2021, London & Quadrant was awarded £55.1 million to deliver 539 homes by the Mayor of London.
In Inside Housing magazine’s 2022 ranking of the Top 50 developing RSLs, London & Quadrant was ranked first after delivering 4,514 homes including 368 for social rent, 484 for affordable rent and 316 for London Affordable Rent. Out of this overall total, 1,364 units were low-cost ownership homes and 1,449 were for market sale. The group also made the largest number of starts with work beginning on 2,102 units in 2021/22.
In the 2022 financial year, the group delivered 4,147 units (2021: 2,699 homes) and began work on a further 3,818 homes (2020: 3,945 homes).
Glenigan Data
In the 2021 calendar year, London & Quadrant submitted detailed planning applications to build a total of 699 homes (2020: 971 homes).
In the 12 months to Q2 2022, London & Quadrant awarded £44.7 million-worth of work to external contractors in contracts valued at £250,000 or more according to Glenigan’s research (2021: £3.8 million).
Conclusion: Still number one
In September 2019, London & Quadrant stopped taking on new development projects due to a downturn in the housing market due to Brexit-related uncertainty and more than £200 million in new costs from meeting increased fire regulations after the Grenfell tragedy.
This had an impact on the group’s planning pipeline and the number of units in detailed planning applications submitted by London & Quadrant has halved between 2019 and 2021. There had been a structural shift away from housing and towards apartments but this has eased. In 2021, 57% of planned new homes were some form of house and the balance flats (2020: 88% houses/12% apartments). The size of schemes being developed has however increased and the average planning application submitted in 2020 contained 176 units (2020: 108 units).
With new work being put on hold since September 2019, L&Q dropped out of Glenigan’s rankings of the industry’s top 100 clients before the coronavirus pandemic struck. Since then, some major works in London have resumed such as sections of the major Barking Riverside development (Project ID: 20269293) and Chobham Manor (Project ID: 11353708) but procurement activity has been limited. In the 12 months to Q2 2021, the average contract awarded by the group was valued at just £4.9 million (2021: £3.8 million) but the number of new homes being delivered continues to rise and increased by 54% in the year to March 2022.
The approved development pipeline has slipped to 29,795 (2021: 32,482), of which 69% are currently on site, but completions are expected to slip to around 3,000 per year.
This will reduce pressure on land holdings, which have been boosted by corporate activity. In December 2016, the group merged with another leading RSL, East Thames, to create the largest social homebuilder in the UK. As part of this deal, the newly enlarged London & Quadrant secured a £2.6 billion refinancing package, which funded the acquisition in April 2017 of land investor Gallagher Estates.
The Gallagher deal secured a landbank of 42,500 plots, mostly in the Midlands and southern England, and will enable a significant step change in completions. London & Quadrant has 92,000 plots secured for the next 10-15 years and 40,000 are ‘oven-ready’ with planning permission granted.
Spending on maintenance rose to £273 million (2021: £190 million) and the group says it will spend on £339 million on fire safety works. The margin at an EBITDA level slipped again to 26% (2021: 31%) but London & Quadrant will remain a social housing behemoth going forward.
Winning work with London & Quadrant
London & Quadrant works in joint venture with major housebuilders, such as Barratt, Countryside and Taylor Wimpey and also with other public bodies, such as the Greater London Authority.
In 2022, London & Quadrant began procurement for a new framework to deliver £2.7 billion of investment in its own stock over the next 15 years (Project ID: 22114572).
London & Quadrant uses its own supplier tendering portal, which can be found here.
Companies interested in working for London & Quadrant should, in the first instance, send in their particulars by post to the commercial manager at 10 Grove Crescent Road, Stratford, London E15 1BJ
Key London & Quadrant procurement contacts include:
Director of procurement – Martin Cawthorn, tel: 0844-406-9000
Head of Procurement – Mark Revell, tel: 0844-406-9000