Design for Manufacture housing competition

Design for Manufacture housing competition brings huge response from UK.

Thirty-three bidders have been selected to go forward to the next stage of the Design for Manufacture competition organised for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister by the United Kingdom's regeneration agency English Partnerships.

The names of those who have made it to the second round were announced at the start of the Offsite 2005 conference and exhibition at the Building Research Establishment, where many of those selected had put on show their ideas for quality homes built at low cost.

One of the first visitors to the exhibition was John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, who spoke of how much encouragement he derived from the overwhelming response of the industry to the challenge presented by the competition.

The level of interest has been staggering, he said.

"We received over 50 expressions of interest in the first stage".

"Originally it was predicted that 15 to 25 firms would move to the next stage, but since the quality of the entries was so high that number has been easily surpassed." Trevor Beattie, responsible for the competition as English Partnerships' director of corporate strategy, said that the high calibre of so many entries was proof of the construction industry's willingness to develop high quality, efficient and innovative designs.

The entries involved more than 100 companies from the United Kingdom and from overseas, coming from a variety of organisations including housing associations, traditional volume house builders and specialist system build suppliers.

The Government's strategy for extending the prospect of home ownership over a wider range of family circumstances is to separate the land price from the construction cost wherever possible.

At one point in his conference speech, Mr Prescott complained that the rising cost of land for housing projects was compelling him to ask the Treasury for subsidies of as much as GBP 80,000 per dwelling.

The equivalent of the subsidy will now be provided by opening up sites in public sector ownership to demonstrate the possibilities of modern methods of construction.

English Partnerships has to date assembled 10 sites for this purpose, one of which - Oxley Park in Milton Keynes - has been designated for use at the second stage of the GBP 60,000 home competition.

This requires the short-listed organisations to submit their visions for design, costing, specification and quality.

They will also be expected to demonstrate how they could repeat processes and methods of procurement to equivalent efficiency on other development sites.

The Oxley Park site has been chosen to provide a real environment for setting out proposals, as well as providing consistency for the purposes of judging.

This site will not be awarded to a bidder at the end of stage two, but will remain available for successful bidders who apply to undertake its development at stage three of the competition.

The deadline for second stage submissions is 2005-07-01.

An independent judging panel appointed by Mr Prescott's office will then approve a shortlist of schemes to proceed to the third stage.

Summit houses at Allerton Bywater One of these GBP 60,000 developments has already been decided for the Allerton Bywater millennium community in South Yorkshire, where English Partnerships is sponsoring construction of 20 of its so-called Summit houses, the prototype of which was seen for the first time at the Government's Sustainable Communities summit conference in Manchester earlier this year.

Using a lightweight steel frame system produced by Fusion Building Systems in Ireland, the Summit house illustrates many of the principles which English Partnerships considers vital to long-term successful developments - good design and structural flexibility making innovative use of volume and space.

This is a three-storey two-bedroom house manufactured off-site and aimed specifically at high density development which helps to reduce the land-take.

Mr Prescott, who is looking forward to handing over keys of the Summit houses to the new occupiers in December, said that the Summit house at Manchester was erected by Fusion in 12 hours.

Provided the necessary services connections are in place when the erection team gets on site, there seems no reason why they shouldn't do something comparable at Allerton Bywater.

"The Summit house", said Mr Prescott, "has shown people it can be done".

"But the point of the Design for Manufacture competition is to get the industry building GBP 60,000 homes not just once or twice, or even 25 times, but thousands of times across the country".

"As well as building better and cheaper, we also need to be smarter about the way we use land.

In the public sector, we used to sell off land and then have to pay ever increasing subsidies for affordable housing".

"It makes more sense", he said, "to keep the land in public ownership and use it for homes built at costs that people can afford.".

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