Laing O’Rourke is planning to ramp up delivery of offsite housing under the guidance of its new head of accommodation Steve Trusler, former head of strategy at Wates.
The contractor’s offsite “kit of parts” construction system, Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), is currently being used to deliver Sir Richard Rogers’ Leadenhall Building, also known as the Cheesegrater, in the City of London, and was used to build around 70% of the UK’s first privately funded council housing scheme in Barking & Dagenham, including the concrete structure, facades and even internal partition walls. The contractor also organised funding for the scheme.
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Now Laing O’Rourke wants to exploit the benefits of DfMA to speed up the delivery of many more new homes to tackle the UK’s chronic housing shortage, said Trusler, who leads strategy in the private residential homes, affordable housing and social housing markets: “The off-site manufacturing approach is critical to meeting the sorts of housing numbers that are required, the industry is delivering about half of what’s needed. Our approach as a business is to do as much of that as possible, whether for accommodation, schools, or hospitals.”
In May, DCLG secretary of state Eric Pickles launched a government push to promote offsite manufactured houses as the solution to the current housing crisis, despite serious doubts from parts of the housing industry.
The communities secretary used his keynote speech at the annual Alan Cherry debate to say the government would support and promote the use of prefabricated housing to help speed up the construction of new homes.
Pickles said: “Offsite is a key technology in achieving affordable homes. In the capital where plots can be small or oddly shaped, offsite construction can be the perfect solution.”
But speaking at the same event, Ben Derbyshire, managing partner at architect HTA, said he was “astonished” that Pickles held it as the answer to the housing crisis.
Laing O’Rourke has ploughed more than £100m into its Explore Industrial Park prefabrication facility in Steetley, Worksop, which is currently developing DfMA prototypes that utilise more lightweight modular steel frames and a range of alternative cladding options.
Laing O’Rourke used its offsite solution at William Street Quarter in Barking
“As a company our philosophy is to use offsite manufacture wherever it is intelligent to use that approach, because there are so many good reasons for doing it,” said Trusler. “Building in factories is faster and guarantees quality. It also helps address the issue of availability of skills at subcontractors [by reducing the amount of on-site labour required], most customers want cost certainty and delivery certainty, which is very difficult to achieve when you have an unreliable supply chain, and that issue isn’t going to go away any time soon,” he added.
The William Street Quarter affordable housing project in the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, designed by architect Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, includes two apartment blocks built entirely using DfMA.
These feature pre-cast concrete columns, floor slabs and structural walls, patterned sand-blasted concrete facades, plus more than 1,000 “Smart Walls”, a unique partition walling system that was delivered to site in a finished state incorporating cables and ductwork and external plasterboard, then simply dropped into position by crane at the same time as the super-structure. Using DfMA helped speed project delivery by around a third, compared to a traditional build.
“There is still negativity in the market around off-site manufacturing and a lot of customers and clients would say that, in the main, offsite is still a cottage industry, made up of small companies with limited investment going into factories,” added Trusler. “From the front end, we’re trying to change some of those dynamics. Offsite challenges the way we think about construction. It is much more about pre-planning and logistics management.
“Some of the things we have become used to in construction, such as designing when still on site, have to be left behind in favour of putting the design to bed early.”
