London Assembly: Designed, Sealed, Delivered

On behalf of the London Assembly Planning Committee, Nicky Gavron AM publishes the report ‘Designed, sealed, delivered: The contribution of offsite manufactured homes to solving London’s housing crisis'.

Rory Bergin, HTA's Sustainable Futures Partner comments:

“HTA contributed our ideas to this initiative through the Housing Forum and support the recommendations of Nicky Gavron's report, highlighting the policies that could be introduced to encourage offsite construction in London. HTA have been promoting the delivery of great housing through offsite manufacture for over 20 years, and recently delivered the tallest modular development in Europe in Wembley.

Our experience suggests that the recommendations in the report will help to bring this innovative approach into the mainstream of construction. In particular we welcome the recommendation to bring forward a programme of development on publicly owned sites that are targeted at a framework of appropriate manufacturers and developers. What the manufacturers who are active in the sector need most is a pipeline of work they can bid for where the strength of their approach is relevant, giving a visible forward pipeline to enable investment in growth of capacity.

We welcome the commitment to produce relevant guidance for the sector, particularly for founders and mortgage lenders, we would also have liked to see some proposals aimed insuring manufacturers in  a large scale construction project where the project size is greater that's the value of the manufacturer. This is often cited as a barrier to the use of manufacturers by clients and contractors.

All in all we commend the Review and look forward to working to increase delivery of the homes London needs using the best of design in manufacture.”