There has never been a better time to develop the offsite industry. It is in a sweet spot where traditional construction is under tremendous pressure simultaneously from several directions. Pressure on skills, immigration, time and cost.
At HTA we are working with a number of modular and offsite companies developing prototypes for factory production, building buildings that are largely factory made, designing new schemes for private rental that can be modularised or prefabricated from the beginning. Within the space of five years prefabricated buildings have gone from being an idea that we devoted a lot of time to promoting, to now being a substantial part of our workload. We have completed four major projects where pre-fabrication played a major role, including one of the largest zero-carbon schemes in the UK and three buildings up to 19 stories high in London. All of these were completed either on-time with few defects, or up to a year earlier than comparable buildings of the same size.
For a rental building, being able to complete a year earlier has a major impact on the viability of the development and trumps most other considerations, which is why so many of our rental projects are either considering this approach seriously, or have already moved away from traditional construction methods. The major benefits to them, apart from the speed of delivery, is that the rooms come complete, with all the fixed elements installed. Depending on the agreement, manufacturers can install all fixed items in the rooms before delivery, including built-in furniture, light fittings and all finishes. The windows and doors are usually installed as the modules are sufficiently stiff to protect them during lifting.
In our experience, it is possible to install a half-dozen modules per crane per day, which is the equivalent of a pair of two bedroom apartments. While the groundworks, cladding and roof elements are all substantial pieces of work and are rarely prefabricated, this speed makes a radical difference to the construction sequence.
When you add to these considerations, the fact that the construction workforce in the UK is at or near to full capacity and that there is not going to be an influx of workers to fill low-skilled roles as has happened in the past, using factory production makes sense as a way of doing more with fewer people. A factory can offer a safe, dry environment, and workers can move from module to module to add materials, services or finishes without intruding on the work of others. They can also become highly skilled because the work that they do is sufficiently repetitive without becoming mind-numbingly dull.
The costs of the prefabrication methods are also dropping as the factory businesses scale up. When a factory is running at full capacity it becomes a very efficient construction system, and the reason that many of them have failed in the UK in the past is that they have rarely had the opportunity to run at full capacity for any substantial period of time. The boom and bust cycle of construction has made it very difficult for those businesses to survive a sudden influx or cancellation of work. Now that these factories are busy, their cost base is not changing as quickly as traditional construction and they can maintain prices for longer while the competition rises theirs. Again this is making developers and contractors look again at prefabrication as their traditional supply chains reach capacity and their price rises.
All of these benefits are available today, but there aren’t enough plants available to make a serious impact on the production levels of the UK housing industry. A good sized factory can produce 1-2000 units per year, which means that we would need fifty of them to make a serious impact on the UK housing shortage. In addition to the fifty factories, we need 500 clients who agree that this is their preferred method of construction, and the factories would need a lot of senior staff who understand manufacturing processes on the one hand, but also understand the needs of the housing market on the other. It is not as simple as taking a factory that produced bits of cars and turning it into one that produces bits of houses. While the production methodology may be similar, the product is very different. Housing needs to be good quality housing. We have had a long and painful legacy of cheaply constructed prefabricated buildings from the post-war years and we must avoid repeating any of those mistakes. The product from the factory must be appropriate and of high quality, or else there is little point in constructing it.
All of this leads me to think that we have the opportunity to create a new industrial sector in the UK, one that could rival the car industry. A solid and long term factory based housing production industry that generated stable outputs, of high quality and which could lever their supply chains to bring down the costs of production. It would take enormous amounts of traffic off our roads, put a lot of white van men and women into stable jobs, reduce the energy consumption of construction, cut down pollution and noise, and transform construction from an unattractive and old-fashioned industry into a modern concern that attracts the brightest and best.
Current factory production is a lot like site-based production but much better organised and safe. Future factory production could be highly automated and use modern manufacturing to increase quality lower costs and deliver greater customer choices through customisation, like almost every other industry on the planet. That is an exciting prospect, but in order to get there, we need some things to change. We need clients to agree that this is the way to build things, we need insurers to support them, we need designers to take a lead in proposing these solutions and we need manufacturers to bring their expertise to bear on solving the housing crisis. Normally I would say that we need political support, but having seen what political support has done to environmental businesses over the last few years I am going to suggest that we leave politicians out of the loop for the moment until it becomes as obvious to them as it is to us that this nascent industry deserves all the support it can get.
Rory Bergin will be speaking at Explore Offsite Housing about ‘Bringing prefabrication into the mainstream of housing delivery’. To book your place and hear directly from Rory, please CLICK HERE
