Attributed to Angela Mansell FCIOB, managing director at Mansell Building Solutions.
Our industry is slow to change. You can blame this on a few things:
Low levels of research and development mean new materials are few and far between and slow to market when they do arrive.
The competitive nature of the industry can make collaboration and change hard.
It’s been this way for so long that some people are reluctant to do things differently.
The cold hard truth is that we haven’t got a choice anymore.
It’s a modernise or die situation.
Labour wants us to build more homes and we can’t do that using the same old traditional methods. Similarly, if we’re going to address the carbon elephant in the room, we’re going to need to embrace innovation and a new approach to doing things.
But for all the good conversations going on across the industry, we’re short an action plan.
Doing things differently
At Mansell, we’ve spent a lot of time in the last year making a positive case for doing things differently. The skills required to deliver traditional construction are leaving the workforce in high numbers and fresh blood isn’t coming in to replace them.
MMC and offsite, while not a silver bullet, offer a promising alternative to traditional methods, bringing with them all the benefits you’d come to expect of offsite prefabrication. Less time on site, better quality control, less weather dependence, carbon savings and less labour required.
And no, we’re talking about volumetric and all the baggage that comes along with it. MMC and offsite is a broad church that includes light gauge steel frame panelisation and even more granular offsite solutions.
Getting the best from offsite
It’s not like we haven’t been building with MMC for a while. But are we doing it well?
To get the most out of offsite and MMC, we need to work differently. This is about a different approach to everything from procurement to construction methodology.
Top of the list is greater collaboration. As a specialist contractor, we want to be involved with the architects, main contractors and developers at the earliest stage of project planning. This allows us to bring our expertise to the table and engage with all the moving parts of the project before the design is finalised.
By working together, we can deliver a design that sets the project up for success, provides certainty and gets the most out of the prefabricated solutions we provide.
Builder smarter not harder
The challenges before us are considerable. Labour has just pledged to do what no government in 50+ years could and build 300k homes a year. To achieve that, we need to work intelligently, utilise the tools we have to their fullest potential, and start embracing different ways of doing things.
Let’s start with a concrete plan for how we can start hitting those lofty housing targets, specifically, a plan that includes the broader acceptance of offsite and MMC, and new ways of working to get the most out of it.
