Trust Talks: Andy talks delivery

Hi Andy, tell us about your role at Mount Anvil

No problem – I’m one of Mount Anvil’s Construction Directors. I’m currently based on site at The Silk District in Whitechapel, where I’m in charge of the whole project, from Health & Safety to quality and delivery. 

I’ve been here in Whitechapel for around four years, but I’ve been at Mount Anvil for… well, let’s just say a lot longer than that.

Why is building trust at the heart of your role?

It’s a huge part of what I do. Building trust with subbies and supply chain, our partners and their residents… If you build that trust, those genuine relationships, you can take everyone on the journey with you and deliver a superb development as a result.

That’s exactly what’s underway here in Whitechapel. The whole site team is on board, they trust us and we trust them – and that’s allowed us to raise the bar and set some really ambitious targets around homes being delivered defect-free, first time. 

We can see that working already – of 149 homes that we recently handed over to L&Q, our partners here at The Silk District, 110 were completely defect free.

That’s a fantastic achievement and a great benchmark to push on from. And it’s a quality standard that’s just as relevant whether we’re working on a £300k affordable home or a £2m apartment. The intention and the attention to quality is the same.

Numbers like that are testament to the whole site team buying into our standards, trusting our vision, and stepping up to the plate.

Why is this important for our partner or their residents?

This might feel like a very simple answer, but the key benefit for our partners and their residents is just knowing that we will do what we say we’re going to do.

If we promise our partners, like we did at the height of the pandemic in 2020, that we’ll still deliver 104 apartments on time by Christmas, they know that we’ll get it done – no ifs, no buts. And we did.

If we sit down in a meeting with residents and say to them “We’ve listened to your feedback, we hear what you’re telling us, and we’re going to do X, Y or Z differently as a result”, they know that we mean it.

That’s where trust comes from for me – if I say I’m going to do something, then I will do it. If I tell you it’s going to get done, it will get done. 

I know this is something that some of our JV partners have struggled with in partnerships with other developers, but building trust really should be that simple. 

And finally, what’s next? 

Pushing our site team to improve those numbers on defect-free handovers. We’ve made a fantastic start, but there’s always plenty of room for improvement.

And look, we’ve been doing what we do for a long time, and doing it well – but we learn something new every day here on site. So we’ll keep learning those lessons, keep improving and keep delivering for our partners.