10 How House Building is Changing and Why More Homes Through Manufacture A Housing Forum Working Group Report he number of new homes being built in the last few years has fallen to the lowest on record – fewer than half the number the UK needs to be producing to reduce housing shortages and bridge the huge affordability gap. A survey from the National Housing Federation last year pointed to the consequences – three out of 10 parents have at least one adult child, aged between 21 and 40, still living with them at home, mostly because their son or daughter cannot afford to rent or buy their own place. But as housebuilders and housing associations begin to increase the building of new homes they are turning to more modern methods of construction to build faster, to higher standards, and to enable them to comply with more stringent demands for greater energy efficiency and therefore lower energy bills. While housebuilding has remained persistently traditional, in that the most common building method involves using a structural inner skin of concrete blocks covered in an outer skin of brick, we are increasingly seeing an array of factoryfabricated components even in traditionally built homes, such as timber roof trusses and timber frame walls. Many other building types – from student accommodation to offices to schools and hospitals – have been using more and more components produced in factories and assembled on site. Housebuilding is now increasingly turning to offsite manufacture for a number of reasons: > Offsite methods offer advantages in terms of speed of construction on site, quality of build, sustainability and reduced health and safety risks. Less labour and fewer materials and deliveries are needed on the construction site, meaning a reduction of noise, disruption, dust and waste created for the local area. > Increasing the energy efficiency of new homes through tightening requirements of Part L of the building regulations is another key driver. It will become more difficult and therefore more expensive to deliver through traditional forms of construction. > Skills shortages – according to Offsite Housing Review, housebuilders said that to increase build capacity to more than 140,000 homes a year they would need to turn to some form of offsite1 . Build rates of 230,000 a year are needed to meet demand. A shortage of traditional tradespeople like bricklayers – and the recent shortages of bricks – has also pushed up prices of building in a traditional way, so that offsite methods are more commercially viable2 . > Offsite manufacture dovetails with the needs of those developing for private or social rent where the financial model relies on faster construction and occupation. At the moment, about 90 percent of all new housing in England and Wales is constructed using masonry – brick and block. The inner skin provides the structural walls that bear the load of the intermediate floors and roof above. Blockwork, set in mortar, has been the
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