According to a government white paper which will be published next month, the Government intends to utilise offsite technologies and build around 100,000 modular homes across Britain by 2020.
The report includes measures that will make lending to offsite home builders more attractive to banks.
The rapid delivery of recent offsite projects (sometimes as quickly as 48 hours for some modular homes) has made the construction method a very interesting and viable option for ministers in tackling the shortage of housing in the UK and meet targets.
In an article in The Telegraph, a government spokesperson said “The first and most obvious advantage is speeding up the building of housing. There is pretty good evidence that if you did it at scale it is cheaper.”
The Communities Department hope the measures will lead to 100,000 off-site manufactured home being built over this parliament.
Housing minister, Gavin Barwell commented: “Offsite construction could provide a huge opportunity to increase housing supply and we want to see more innovation like this emulated across the housebuilding sector.”
The Government have initially identified two key areas where support must be given, the first of which is to provide direct funding to construction firms in order to help them deliver new prefabs. Secondly, they want to encourage lenders to make more money available by showing them that the technology is low risk and lucrative.
Whilst compiling their research, Housing Minister Gavin Barwell and communities secretary Sajid Javid visited West Midlands based housing association ‘Accord Group’, who have stated that they can create a three-bedroom house at their factory in just 24 hours. They also visited London firm ‘Pocket’, who specialise in building affordable flats for first-time buyers.
