Showplace for modern methods of construction

Innovation Park will be showplace for modern methods of construction.

One significant development which came to light at Offsite 2005 is the new partnership for application of modern methods of construction between the Building Research Establishment and Smartlife whose chief executive Kevin Scobell spoke to the conference about the way in which Cambridgeshire County Council is facing up to the demand for new housing in the designated growth areas.

This initiative will not only help the industry as it grapples with the demands of a greatly enlarged housing program, but the partnership is also learning from the efforts of communities in Europe faced with their own housing problems.

The expertise so gathered may well travel: Smartlife is understood to be engaged in preliminary discussions with the Chinese authorities about the potential for offsite production to meet the huge housing demand in China's expanding cities.

At the same time BRE announced the start-up of a new Innovation Park.

This will be a 'mini-village' of full-scale demonstration houses, permitting the industry to try out new and emerging technologies.

Equally important is the need for training facilities of the kind being developed by Smartlife, currently with funding from the U.K.

Government and the European Union building a GBP 2.5 million training centre at the Cambridge Regional College Science Park.

According to BRE sources, the Innovation Park is aimed at boosting confidence in modern methods of construction now regarded as essential to raising the build rate of new homes by 39,000 a year in line with Kate Barker's recommendations in her Housing Supply report.

The park will be part of the new Centre of Excellence for Housing recently opened by BRE on its Watford campus.

Peter Bonfield, managing director of BRE's construction division, explained that housing providers, lenders and insurers have told BRE that the slow uptake of modern methods of construction is due to concerns over whether MMC dwellings will perform well and retain their value over time.

Also, whether they can be cost-effectively repaired following incidents such as fire and flood.

"The Innovation Park", he said, "and the LPS scheme will show how MMC has the potential to deliver the step change in construction that we need so urgently".

"Both schemes will develop over time to embrace the newest and best technologies on an on-going basis." Training centre for new technology The Smartlife concept originated with Cambridgeshire County Council facing a government target for 89,000 new homes to be built over the next 15 to 20 years.

The current construction rate in the county is 3,000 a year at most, leaving the question of how they were going to meet the annual shortfall estimated at around 1,500 houses a year.

Thinking then turned to the potential of MMC.

Inquiries which followed put the county in touch with two cities, one in Sweden, the other in Germany, both facing difficulties in delivering new housing in growth areas.

In Hamburg the aim is to improve the craft skills required to develop its dockland area, whereas in Malmo the main issue was sustainability.

The Smartlife movement based in Cambridge is currently working on pilot projects including building 80 homes to assess the performance of MMC compared with traditional methods.

The scheme will employ four methods of construction, three modern and one traditional.

For each method BRE will analyse cost, quality, energy use and the amount of waste involved, said by traditional means to average about 20 per cent of the material content.

Out of this phase of experimentation and analysis, confidence is growing that MMC will at least be competitive in cost with traditional construction.

And if it isn't, says Kevin Scobell, we will be able to find out where the extra costs arise and work on that.

The Smartlife training centre due for completion early next year will have an annual intake of 500 students which should help to counter the shortfall in construction skills in Cambridgeshire and the East of England.

Another set of skills in short supply is people able and qualified to train the aspirants for proficiency in MMC.

For the present this is being covered by Hamburg's training centre where current members of staff are not being fully employed owing to the economic situation in Germany.

Barriers to modern methods Kate Barker asked in her interim report why it was that modern methods of offsite manufacture were not used more widely.

She pointed out a number of barriers to the application of modern manufacturing techniques, and observed that the house building industry was only just beginning to develop the capability and skills to employ these methods more widely.

In response the government set up an inquiry into these barriers and Ashley Lane of Westbury Homes, chairman of the Barker 33 steering group, told the conference about the work done by the House Builders Federation, National House Building Council and CITB Construction Skills among others to develop a strategy to address these issues.

Mr Lane started by reminding the conference that housing output in the twelve-month period 2003-04 was about 150,000, bringing house building to its lowest ebb of production for nearly 100 years.

Against that he said was demand measured at about 225,000 dwellings a year.

His group was asked to report back to government with a balanced view of the role that MMC could play in increasing production based on the views and experience of as many industry stakeholders as possible.

They found that nearly 90 per cent of the industry's output was based on on-site construction but that most of the major house-building companies were using MMC to some extent.

An important clarification reached during this inquiry was that MMC was not solely offsite construction.

The term should apply wherever modern manufacturing products are incorporated in the structure whether on site or off it.

The top ten barriers, said Mr Lane were: lack of understanding, lack of confidence, perceptions of cost, lack of a positive track record to date; lack of agreement on product and process standards; traditional forms of process management (a barrier that exists at all levels of the industry); design bias; immaturity of the supply chain (doubts about capacity to deliver); lack of the requisite skills, including construction management skills; lastly, the determination to turn MMC from being a requirement imposed on the industry into a realisation that this was what was needed to secure its economic future - a 'want' as he described it.

There have been two interim reports, but despite pressure from the government, the Barker 33 Group has so far refused to make any firm recommendations as to the way through the obstacles that beset the industry in its attempt to modernise.

But the group's final report is taking shape and should be delivered to the Government in the Autumn, at which time its findings will be available to the house building industry.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the Barker 33 Group believes that modern methods of construction can make a substantial contribution to solving the housing problem.

That indeed was evident from the Offsite 2005 event.

But Mr Lane left his audience in no doubt that this will not come to fruition unless the Government also tackles the land and planning issues so fully expounded in the main part of Kate Barker's report.

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