Robertson social housing board: safety, defects and design lessons for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Robertson Partnership Homes has installed a new five-man board – managing director John Baggley, operations director Craig Smith, commercial director Ed Parry, finance director Paul Gray and pre-construction director Andy Park – to steer its Scottish affordable and public sector housing work. The governance change follows defects identified in more than 700 Robertson-built homes across 12 Edinburgh sites, which forced residents out and raised serious safety concerns. The new board is tasked with standardising housing designs for greater consistency, reliability and quality, while supporting local authorities and registered social landlords under acute delivery pressure.
Technical Brief
- Governance response centres on a refreshed RPH board with clear separation of operations, commercial, finance and pre-construction accountabilities.
- Standardisation of housing designs is being pursued to reduce variability in detailing, interfaces and build quality across multiple sites.
- Case reinforces the need for robust client-side technical assurance and clerk-of-works presence on volume social housing programmes.
Our Take
Within the 641 Infrastructure stories in our database, Scotland has relatively few large‑scale residential defect cases of this size, so the Edinburgh issues at Robertson Partnership Homes are likely to become a reference point for future Scottish social‑housing procurement and oversight clauses.
For a contractor of Robertson Group’s scale, more than 700 defective homes across 12 Edinburgh sites signals a systemic quality‑assurance problem rather than an isolated site failure, which will likely drive clients to demand more intrusive independent inspection and sign‑off on social‑housing schemes.
Given this piece is tagged under both Failure and Safety, the governance changes at Robertson Partnership Homes will be watched closely by other UK social‑housing providers, as repeated safety‑tagged items in our coverage often precede tighter building‑control and warranty requirements on similar projects.
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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