PLUMBING & DRAINAGE
PLASTICS, POWER, AND PROGRESS
Strategic investment in plastics, power and production capacity is helping Naylor prepare for the next construction upturn, as Fiona Russell Horne finds out.
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hen Edward Naylor took over the family business in 1993, it was a clay pipe manufacturer. Thirty years on, that product
offer is now purely plastic pipes, and there has been some serious long-term investment underpinning that transformation, investment in people, in power and in production capacity, as the company gets set to grow when the construction sector finally turns a corner.
Leadership development, Naylor explains, has been a strategic priority of the group for years. ”We’ve had an active apprentice and management trainee programme running for several years now, so leadership development
has been a deliberate focus rather than something we’ve approached reactively.” At the centre of that structure sits managing director Chris Ainger, who joined last year to lead Naylor Drainage, and has now extended his remit across several other sites, including the specialist plastics operations at Gainsborough, Tipton and Wombwell. With Naylor now operating across five to seven sites, the changes allow the business to unlock efficiencies and think more holistically about materials, procurement and production. “The materials we buy for one site are often the same materials we’re buying for another,” Naylor says. “That scale creates opportunity.” The move away from clay altogether was
Above: Christopher Ainger
the group’s most significant strategic shift. When Naylor joined the company, around 80,000 tonnes of clay pipe was coming off the production lines. By 2024, that figure was down to just 12,000 tonnes. He says: “Effectively, the market went from ‘everything must be clay’ to ‘almost nothing is clay’.” 2024 was the last time a clay pipe came off the line. Today, the £50 million pipe operation is entirely plastic.
That shift also fundamentally altered the main site at Barnsley. The footprint for clay manufacturing is enormous, winding down that side of the business freed up space, a lot of space. Around £6 million has been invested in removing old clay equipment and repurposing facilities to meet the far more exacting requirements of plastics manufacturing.
The company now sits on a 55-acre site with extensive spare buildings and land. From Ainger’s perspective, that’s almost unheard
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net February 2026
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