Offsite construction allows housing associations to build better homes for less, says Alan Yates
The government has committed to increasing housebuilding from 130,000 by at least another 100,000 homes per annum.
Their apparent interest in offsite manufacturing follows the publishing of the Farmer Review of the UK construction labour model – subtitled ‘modernise or die’. This report, which was produced by the Construction Leadership Council, considers how to reduce the vulnerability of the construction industry to skills shortages and looks specifically at the potential role for offsite manufactured housing in the private rented sector.
The Accord Local Homes factory demonstrates how we can develop the capacity to erect more high quality homes at lower cost than traditional building.
There are added advantages of reduced waste, less defects, speed of construction, fewer vehicle movements and lower running costs.
The government has been interested in this agenda for some time, as evidenced by visits to our factory by the former housing minister Brandon Lewis who witnessed a pair of semi-detached houses being erected on site in a day. More recently Gavin Barwell, the current housing and planning minister, visited the factory and one of our live sites to see homes being erected.
Prior to that, I attended round table discussions with Kris Hopkins (predecessor to Brandon Lewis) and a number of manufacturers and developers, and he was particularly keen to see an increase in offsite manufacture following the publication of the Offsite Housing Review by the Construction Industry Council in 2013. This report suggested that when a step change in housebuilding is required, then this offers an opportunity to do things differently – in fact in order to meet higher build targets you are compelled to do things differently.
For Accord, we had been importing a highly insulated panellised system from Norway and with our own in-house design team now familiar with the product, five years ago we decided to move into offsite manufacturing ourselves. Feedback from our tenants has been great and with such low running costs they are better able to keep warm and healthy, and of course it leaves a bit more money to help pay the rent. So it makes good business sense for a landlord to build these efficient homes too.
Having the ability to design and manufacture our own homes, the last piece of the jigsaw was to erect them. We embarked on this with the establishment of a construction team two years ago and the net result is that we are now building higher-quality homes for a lower cost than traditional build – a good example of value for money.
In addition to selling homes from our factory to other housing associations and councils, Accord has now developed a replicable ‘factory in a box’ concept that would result in more factories being established across the country. We can support other developing organisations to quickly move into offsite manufacturing, gaining the benefit of the 10 years’ work we have put into developing this concept.
The potential market is huge and with the well-publicised L&G factory in Leeds reportedly able to manufacture 3,000 new homes per year, that leaves another 97,000 still to be manufactured in order to provide the 100,000 additional homes required to meet government aspirations.
Original link - Inside Housing
