HADLEY GROUP ROUNDTABLE
DELIVERING CONSTRUCTION OF REAL VALUE
The pressure to find new ways to deliver affordable housing across the UK is enormous. To focus on the role offsite manufacture can play to help ease this pressure, the Hadley Group – providers of steel products to the construction industry for more than 50 years – hosted a Roundtable Event to discuss future developments and transformational change.
A decades-long decrease of housebuilding, demographic change, inflated house prices and recent economic gloom, alongside a healthy dose of Brexit, have all combined to create a ‘housing crisis’ – a phrase now deeply ingrained in the collective public consciousness. This combination of factors has pushed the notion of home ownership out of the reach of many parts of society and depending on which part of the UK you want to live and work, ‘affordable housing’ is open to much debate. So the necessity to provide more homes of all tenures and types across the UK is widely recognised as is the magnitude of raising building quality and streamlining delivery standards. The role housing associations and local authorities play is of huge significance and the quality of what they provide is under more scrutiny than ever before. Offsite construction is being
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championed as a way to fundamentally improve the process of housing delivery with some housing associations at the vanguard of change – Swan Housing Group and Accord Housing Association in particular – but many registered providers and local authorities are slow and cautious on a wider uptake of offsite methods. With lengthy housing waiting lists across the UK, homes have to be delivered faster and prove a ‘cost neutrality’ compared to traditional masonry construction. It is only when this can guaranteed that offsite will become adopted more widely. With investment decisions for housing associations and registered providers a long term prospect, with space standards, build quality, reduced defect rates and lower maintenance costs, the ‘sustainability of tenancy’ is paramount. “I have seen offsite products as good if not better than
traditional build,” says Richard Whittaker, Director of Development, WM Housing. “But that bottom line is so important.”
“There needs to be trust and understanding of how we best develop offsite and use its benefits outside traditional build models There is no single solution – a hybrid solution can help make a site as commercially viable as possible. Ben Towe, Group Managing Director, Hadley Group Collaborate Not Compete Modern offsite technology can deliver higher levels of quality and potentially any ‘cost barriers’ could be overcome with the pooling of demand by registered providers and larger numbers of housing units. “It
WWW.OFFSITEMAGAZINE.CO.UK | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018