Caddick extra care housing at Blowick Moss: design and services notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Caddick will construct 141 extra care homes at Torus Homes’ £50m Blowick Moss Lane scheme in Southport, backed by over £11m from Homes England. The project comprises 118 apartments in the main extra care block, 18 apartments in two independent living buildings and five mews houses, all designed for older residents with communal facilities to support independent living. All units will use electric panel heaters and hot water heat pumps with no gas boilers, and the contract was let via Torus’ four-year Contractors Framework for North West housing and retrofit works.
Technical Brief
- Contract award to Caddick was via Torus’ Contractors Framework, established to streamline North West delivery.
- Framework term is four years, enabling batching of housing and retrofit schemes for programme certainty.
- Caddick’s appointment to the framework dates from 2025, so this is an early call-off project.
- More than £11m of the £50m capex is direct grant from Homes England, reducing borrowing exposure.
- Electric-only space and water heating removes gas service connections, simplifying utility coordination and meter room layouts.
- Extra care model requires integrated communal and wellbeing spaces, driving larger structural grids and MEP distribution zones.
- Independent living blocks and mews houses introduce mixed typologies on one site, complicating phasing and access logistics.
- Framework-based procurement for extra care and retrofit schemes is becoming common in the region for cost and time control.
Our Take
The 141-home scale at Blowick Moss Lane is comparable with Caddick Construction’s other mid-sized regional projects such as the £25m Melbury Court student scheme in Durham, suggesting Torus Homes is leveraging a contractor comfortable delivering complex, multi-unit living environments under tight urban constraints.
Caddick’s 2025–2029 appointment to Torus’ Contractors Framework gives Torus a pre-procured route for further extra care or independent living phases in the North West, which can materially shorten procurement lead times for follow-on plots if this Southport model proves successful.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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