BRITAIN is on the cusp of a new age of factory-built homes straight off the assembly line. Prefabricated homes are nothing new but they are expected to play a dominant role in the housebuilding market if Gordon Brown is to fulfil his recent promise to accelerate UK housebuilding from about 160,000 to 240,000 homes a year.

“When you look at the number of houses the Government is talking about, housebuilders will have to give serious consideration to transferring output to the factory floor,” says Peter Bonfield, the managing director of the Building Research Establishment’s construction division.

Prefabrication has long been championed by the Government as a quicker, safer, greener and potentially cheaper way to build homes. This is because factories are a “controlled” environment where quality can be assured and there are no breaks for bad weather. A 40-week building programme can be cut to 16 weeks using prefabrication and the process is geared to high volume and high repetition, which reduces costs. Prefabrication is well established in the hotel sector and on some social housing projects but in the last two years the big housebuilders have started to embrace off-site housebuilding.

“All the big housebuilders are now choosing to do off-site construction,” says Margaret Allen, the director of the Government’s affordable housing agency the Housing Corporation; more than 40 per cent of its new homes are now built using off-site techniques. She adds: “Housebuilders are telling me they can do it and make a profit, no problem.” Some of

Britain’s biggest housebuilders have developed off-site factories producing their own brands, such as Redrow’s Framing Solutions, Taylor Wimpey’s Prestoplan and Persimmon’s Space4.

An estimated 35,000 off-site homes are built in the UK each year, the majority by prefabricating the timber or steel frame and walls off-site and assembling them on site within two days. More sophisticated systems are increasingly popular, where windows and even finished bathrooms are fitted into place in the factory, but housebuilders are yet to take them up in great numbers because they are about 10 per cent more expensive than traditional construction.

However, an acute shortage of skilled labourers such as bricklayers and the forecast of an annual 8 per cent rise in building costs in the next few years will make factory-built homes, which use a quarter of the labour, more cost-effective, says Oliver Novakovic, of the BRE.

But do people want to live in a prefabricated house? Some years ago a MORI poll found that 90 per cent of people would prefer a traditionally built house to a prefabricated one. However, attitudes have changed as the quality and robustness of these homes has improved, Allen says. Crucially, she adds, mortgage lenders have changed their attitude. “Lenders have been cautious especially after some of the poor quality prefab council housing of the 1960s. But people are securing mortgages on these properties and that wasn’t the case a few years ago.” Novakovic adds: “Consumers care most about the location, the kitchen, bathroom and size of the rooms. They don’t mind whether it was built in a factory or on site as long as it’s safe and robust.”

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