Labour’s opportunity: Releasing the potential of modular housing

Despite everything, it looks as if the progress we are making in the UK with modular offsite manufactured housing is gaining global attention – that is if recent invitations we have received at HTA Design are anything to go by.

What seems to be grabbing the world’s attention are two projects recently completed in Croydon, for Greystar and Outpost Management respectively, both delivered by the sector-leading contractor Tide Construction with its astonishingly slick supply chain, most notably the Vision Volumetric subcontractor.

In recent weeks we have been invited to conferences in Paris and Lisbon, and I take no personal credit for the fact that, at the close of my presentation in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the audience erupted in whoops and whistles like never before in my long experience – I’m really not that much of an act! Why such enthusiasm, you may well ask?

The UK’s best in this sector are a decade ahead of most developed economies. So, the government could have a big success on their hands here

Wherever we go, in world cities in particular, local markets can see that Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) can contribute to solving local problems: the challenge of zero carbon; failure of housing supply; the affordability crisis; poor build quality and cost of non-compliance; poor environmental performance and living conditions; safety; and workforce shortages. Add to that the potential for tackling the stubborn inefficiency of the building industry, a continuing drag on productivity of many economies.

Our audiences can also see the satisfaction to be gained for everyone in these modern supply chains, from designers who are properly engaged in the means of production to factory workers in warm dry conditions and site operatives free of wet trades and mud. And it is clear that the vocal response of my Brazilian audience was not all down to Iberian cultural abandon.

I would say that the UK’s best in this sector are a decade ahead of most developed economies. So, the government could have a big success on their hands here.

Not only might this know-how significantly benefit our economy and the wellbeing of citizens at home – there is significant export potential for manufacturing and services.

This will not happen without coherent government intervention – and it is not all about money, either. While the extraordinary success of Tide shows what is possible, it is very exceptional because of its long-standing, successful track record in the sector.

The failure rate among others in the sector is shocking. I have a list of 10 offsite manufacturing initiatives that have either quit the sector or gone bust in recent years. I put that down to the Conservative government’s misguided belief that the market would find a way when it abandoned the national industrial strategy during the David Cameron years.

Labour has pledged to put this right and the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), set up to advise ministers on these matters, has come up with a 10-point plan for what is now needed. This is wide-ranging and includes the need for aggregated and extended procurement programmes (we did this in the sixties with the Clasp Schools programme with great success), tougher regulations on embodied carbon, the incentivising of more appropriate project finance and re-equipping the industry with a change management programme, which also tackles the new skills needed.

The CLC recommendations do not need money in themselves, but there needs to be a public housing programme on which the government can apply leverage

Of course, we have had government construction advisors and DfMA tsars in the past. Talk to Paul Morell or Mark Farmer now and you will detect a distinct sense of disillusionment that the prize of a modernised and industrialised housebuilding sector is as far away as it was in 1944, when Nye Bevan famously said: “I have been looking eagerly for some system of prefabrication which would enable us to build houses in the same way as cars and aeroplanes. So far my search has been in vain, but I do not despair.”

The fact is that Tide has got where it is today by tapping into the institutional investment market for Build to Rent (aka multifamily) and student (or PBSA) markets, as well as securing repeat partnerships. The government cannot expect to see more widespread application unless it also has skin in the game.

The CLC recommendations do not need money in themselves, but there needs to be a public housing programme on which the government can apply leverage.

In any event, most of us are expecting Rachel Reeves to liberate herself from spending constraints come next week’s Budget, and discount borrowing for investment in housing from the PSBR. If she does not, pundits are saying there is no hope of delivering 300,000 homes per year.

If and when Labour does begin the programme of public investment in housing at scale, it should be allied to a new deal for the construction industry – just as the CLC is saying it should.

Do that, and Keir Starmer may yet be able to echo the refrain of his predecessor of six decades ago. In October 1963, the then Labour party leader Harold Wilson, speaking of the party’s plans to harness a scientific revolution to modernise British industry and drive economic progress said “the Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry”.

Or, as Mark Farmer put it, we modernise or we die.

>> Also read: HTA Design completes ‘Europe’s tallest modular building’ for Tide