Legal & General has been given the confidence to invest in a major housing project following the Budget
Anew generation of prefab housing is to go up at a 272-acre site near Wokingham after Legal & General said the Budget had given it confidence to invest.
The pension giant’s house building arm will accelerate its use of “offsite” construction and begin erecting 1,500 homes at the end of next year. It is L&G’s second major development as it seeks long-term income in the property market.
It will build homes for sale and rent, as well as retirement and student properties, many of which will be shipped from its new factory in Leeds. The firm announced last year that it would be investing £55m into the facility, which has the potential to build 3,000 homes a year.
It said that using this method and building different types of homes, such as a mix of housing and flats, would reduce the time it would take to complete the development by five years. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, said in the Budget last week that the Government would use its purchasing power to drive the adoption of modern methods of construction, including building homes offsite in factories, in order to speed up delivery.
This kind of construction is much more common in Continental Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, but has not recently been used at scale in this country.
As well as homes, the site, in the village of Arborfield, has outline planning consent for a school, shops and offices.
More than a third of the development will be affordable housing.
Nigel Wilson, the chief executive of L&G, said the Budget created “the right backdrop for a real boost” to housing supply.
“Legal & General will therefore accelerate our roll-out of housing and associated infrastructure including on larger sites where we can create whole new communities, like Crowthorne and Arborfield,” he said.
L&G has said it aims to do for housing what Henry Ford’s production line breakthroughs did for the car industry, by building higher-quality homes more quickly and cheaply than traditional methods. Its homes rely heavily on engineered timber, and will arrive on site almost complete, including painting and carpets.
Original link - Telegraph
