As offsite construction gains traction among more firms, the need to integrate it with traditional construction methods becomes increasingly important.

The solution isn’t about choosing one approach over the other, but creating a harmonious environment where both can work together effectively.

Edward Jezeph, Senior Manager at Homes England, believes that offsite firms working in isolation is not the answer and forcing the technology onto those accustomed to traditional methods is more likely to lead to failure than success.

Homes England mandated MMC in our affordable housing programme – It’s one of our largest programmes, at £7.4 billion and 100,000 homes.

We put a 25 per cent mandate into that programme and everybody had a big discussion about why 25 per cent and why not 100 per cent? If it’s a good solution, why not do it at that larger scale?

It was partly reflecting on the capacity of the sector, but it was also about bringing everybody with you and managing that change process.

Most people who will be delivering offsite will be doing it for the first time, therefore there is a risk to innovation as you bring people into a new delivering methodology.

What we see in Homes England is better housing outcomes when using offsite, building houses faster, higher quality and more sustainable. But we’ve also seen projects where manufacturers have gone under and derailed, delayed, or overrun projects, essentially creating major issues.

We need to understand the fact that we need to bring everybody with us and not just have offsite working in isolation. The disconnect between the traditional on site and offsite manufacturing is often where it goes wrong.

What can the government do to provide reduction in market volatility?

We have a deeply cyclical housing market and we understand that manufacturers need stability as you have the potential to lose your manufacturing supply chain on every cycle.

The diversification of business models is how existing manufacturers manage to ride the peaks and the troughs and having a single product category is a risk.

In terms of what the government is doing, in the past it has looked at longer-term mortgages to try and create something that reduces some of the cyclicality.

The challenge we have is that although the housing market might be in a downturn because of inflation and interest rates rising, the housing need hasn’t gone away, we’ve just disabled the market’s ability to purchase.

There are financial solutions that should be possible to help smooth that, but I don’t think you’re ever going to remove the full cycle. It’s more about managing the peaks and troughs and not getting to the place where we are at the moment where we’ve lost quite a large part of our supply chain.

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