Manchester looking into offsite housing delivery programmes

City keen to promote modern methods of construction, says council's housing director

Manchester council would need to "think really carefully" about partnering with start-up offsite construction companies on its expanding homes programme, the authority's housing director has said.

Jon Sawyer, Manchester city council's director of housing and residential growth, told a session on modern methods of construction at the recent Chartered Institute of Housing annual conference that the authority is keen to promote such technologies.

"We want modular and offsite technologies applied in as many homes as possible," he said.

Sawyer said the council is working up plans to aggregate a number of small garage sites, each of which contains land for up to 25 units apiece, into a portfolio numbering around 500 dwellings.

And Manchester is in talks with local housing associations about developing these 500 plots, which he said would create a sufficiently big portfolio for a modular supplier to partner on.

Sawyer said the council will be able to influence the procurement of another 25,000 homes which it is involved in delivering through joint venture partnerships, requiring them to "at least give careful thought to the benefits of modular".

But Manchester wanted to work with manufacturers with "durable brands", which are able pick up the pieces if there are problems several years down the line.

He said: "Developers and contractors have gone bust and you need brands that will still be there in 10 to 15 years.

"You have to look in the eyes of people and believe they are a long-term business that we can do business with for the next 10, 15, 20 years," Sawyer said, while stressing that there is "a role" for start-up manufacturers like the recently established Ilke Homes.

The Manchester director also called on offsite manufacturers to develop north west supply chains in order to boost training and employment opportunities within the region.

He said: "The majority of factories are in the M1 corridor and we will buy from them in the short and medium term. We want factories in the north west as well as those locations, so this is a whole UK supply chain and not just an M1 supply chain."

And Sawyer urged the industry to be more transparent about its costs.

"It's increasingly clear that quality and speed can be better but pretty clear that the cost is higher.

"We need the (offsite) sector to be open with its price structure and work with clients to find ways to bring that down, perhaps through aggregated buying."

Fiona Fletcher Smith, group director of development and sales at housing association L&Q, urged high street banks to "step up to the plate" on providing finance for offsite homes.

"We bailed out these banks 10 years ago, so step up boys. We need to get that fixed because if we can't get retail mortgages and can't secure debt against these portfolios it's not going to work," she said, adding that the housing sector is holding conversations with the government about the issue.

She also complained that lenders are also being overly cautious about lending on shared ownership properties which L&Q has been selling for 30 years.

Fletcher Smith said that rather than simply taking an existing product off the shelf, L&Q is developing its bespoke approach to offsite construction, which it will be unveiling in the "next few months".