Housing minister urges sector to consider off-site construction
Author: Carl Brown, Inside Housing |
The housing minister, in a speech to the National Housing Federation’s annual conference in Birmingham yesterday, urged housing associations to consider using off-site construction methods.
He said: ‘I want the whole housing industry to consider how they can use innovative construction. Off-site construction not only creates high quality affordable homes but it also delivers them quickly and that could be an important part of the challenge of delivering more homes.
‘When we bear in mind a traditional house can take 20 weeks to build and modern technology will allow it to take?generally three to four weeks, that will dramatically change the pace in he which we can provide the housing we need.’
Mr Lewis said technology can’t be far away from enabling ‘real customer power’ by allowing people to tailor the design of their own homes.
A fifth of the homes built using 900m allocated under the initial phase of Affordable Homes Programme funding for 2015/18 will be built using off-site techniques.
Mr Lewis also said the government will pursue a ‘range of initiatives’ to encourage custom build. It has consulted on a new right to build to give custom builders a right to a plot of land.
Mr Lewis also defended the coalition government’s record on house building, saying it will deliver 335,000 affordable homes between 2011 and 2018, ‘the fastest rate of affordable housebuilding in two decades’.
He also said associations had ‘rose to the challenge’ in 2011 when the government cut grant and introduced the new affordable rent model – under which associations charge up to 80% of market rent.
He said: ‘Your hard work and business acumen allowed us to keep delivering large numbers of homes for subsidised rents with less capital subsidy – that has meant significant savings for hard working taxpayers.’