Housing: Modern Methods of Construction

Lord Carrington of Fulham Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Carrington of Fulham]

That this House takes note of the role of Modern Methods of Construction in the housing construction sector.

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to introduce this debate and to propose this Motion. As many noble Lords will be aware, my noble friend Lord Moylan won the ballot for this debate, but he has been appointed to the Opposition Front Bench and so is unable to stand where I am standing. Fear not: he is on the list of speakers so he will get his two minutes’ worth to say what really should be said by me standing where I am. He is chairman of the Built Environment Select Committee and chaired our inquiry into modern methods of construction. I had the pleasure of serving on the committee during that inquiry, which is one of the reasons he asked me to speak today.

This debate comes at a time when our country is in desperate need of more housing. The previous Government had a target of 300,000 homes per annum. As I understand it, the new Government have a target of 1.5 million homes over the term of the Parliament, which noble Lords with a ready reckoner will quickly work out is the equivalent of 300,000 per annum, possibly back-loaded. There is considerable doubt, given the demographics of our country, whether either figure—300,000 or 1.5 million—is enough. It is certainly the minimum we need, but even so it has not been achieved in recent years. We got over 200,000 recently, but it looks as though this year the figure will be nearer 150,000. There is a strong case that we need an increase of 400,000 homes a year.

The problems in achieving this target have bedevilled housing Ministers for generations: our planning system, skills shortages in the building trades, and sometimes violent local opposition to new housing. MMC, as I shall call modern methods of construction for speed, could have a role in solving at least some of those problems. With MMC homes can be built fast, or faster than using traditional methods on-site, and it would go a long way towards resolving the dire shortage of skilled construction workers, whether they are bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, roofers or carpenters.

Perhaps I ought to explain what MMC is. Those of us of a certain age will remember prefabs, which after the Second World War were used to urgently house people made homeless by the Blitz. They were factory-built homes that could be transported on the back of a lorry to parks and open spaces, where they were then connected to the services—drains, water, electricity and gas. I remember many of them in Chiswick, where I was brought up. They were much loved by the tenants who lived in them, possibly because they were placed on public open spaces and had small gardens.

MMC is a modern version of that idea. The homes, or the components that are assembled to make up a home, are factory-built and then transported to the building site, which is preprepared with services such as foundations, sewerage, water and electricity. There are seven categories of MMC, and in ascending order they require increasing amounts of assembly on-site. I propose to concentrate only on types 1 and 2. The first is when the unit or home is fully finished in the factory and needs only to be lowered on to the foundations at the site and connected to the services. Type 2 is best described as a flat-pack version of type 1—or an IKEA tribute act—where the components of the structure are stuck together on-site. The other five MMC types have some benefits but require much more work to assemble them.

The advantages of MMC over traditional building methods are essentially that less skilled work is required on the site because the building work is done in a factory-controlled environment. This has major quality-control advantages, and therefore less snagging after completion, which is the curse of the building industry. The people building the home in the factory can be trained and supervised to a much higher standard, and use can be made of modern production techniques such as 3D printing. There are of course logistical benefits: building materials can be delivered in bulk and stored at the factory to be used as required.

However, there are problems. It requires a lot of capital investment to build the factory, train the workforce, establish reliable supply chains and buy the high-tech equipment required. If the factories can attract only small numbers of orders and no long-term commitments to place more, the unit costs of the homes are high—certainly as high as building homes in the conventional way. It is a bit of a vicious circle: high prices lead to few orders, and few orders lead to even higher prices. So it is perhaps not surprising that many of the companies that entered into this market have gone bust or just packed up and gone away.

The only way of solving this problem is to guarantee the suppliers of MMC homes a sufficiently large order book. Then we might end up with a virtuous circle, of full order books leading to highly competitive unit prices, giving speed of construction and higher quality. Why has that not happened? There has been resistance from planners, resistance from insurance companies and warrantee providers, and, in many cases, resistance from the big housebuilders. Last but not least, there has been vocal opposition from local communities concerned at dozens or hundreds of identical box homes being foisted on them.

Planning consent seems to be a major problem in some parts of the country. MMC should not find it more difficult to get planning permission than traditional housing, but there may be resistance by planners to new ideas, concern about ease of maintenance or worries about design quality. Perhaps building blocks of flats in urban areas using MMC should not cause a concern to planning authorities or to local residents, but, after Grenfell, the industry will need to demonstrate that MMC is as safe as, or safer than, conventional building methods.

The image and anticipation of tower blocks made up of factory-built units, identical and slotted together, is off-putting, so quality of design is vital for getting public acceptance. Even tower blocks need to be well designed. A beautiful tower designed by a talented architect can be a delight—you have only to look at some of the commercial and residential blocks designed by Mies van der Rohe—but, equally, housing estates or new towns of identical or near-identical homes are guaranteed to raise objections and opposition, which slows the planning process and, in worst cases, can blight a whole district. Good design makes getting planning consent easier and community acceptance more likely.

Variety of design is also important. The Built Environment Committee was told that MMC could be adapted to any finish. That may well be so, but the same unit with a brick finish, or tiles or wood cladding or whatever, will still be the same unit—rather like, in the immortal words of Sarah Palin, putting lipstick on a pig. What is needed is to incorporate brilliant design, with a wide variety of styles and floor-plans, as well as finishes, that respect the traditional materials of the region, to gain acceptance by planners and local communities.

We know from experience with MMC that the problems are not going to solve themselves, but solving them could bring massive benefits, with well-built, well-designed, varied houses and flats fitting into their communities, providing much-needed homes at a smaller price than traditional building methods and delivered much faster. It is worth noting that both the Netherlands and Germany use MMC extensively and with considerable success, so these problems can be resolved.

However, the industry cannot solve the problems on its own, nor can local authorities, with the budget and planning constraints they have. It will take a concerted effort by the Government, and perhaps Homes England, to ensure that the flow of orders for these homes allows for the capital investment required in the factories. Budget constraints must not be allowed to lose design quality and variety of floor-plan and materials, all of which will push up the cost. That will guarantee failure, through both the bankruptcy of the MMC companies and rejection by the local communities.

I guess the real question of this debate is whether the new Government are committed to acting as a midwife for this industry, helping it into the brave new world of rapid, cost-effective homebuilding, with all the financial support, design encouragement and tearing up of red tape that that entails. I look forward to this debate and, in particular, to the Minister’s reply, which I am sure will lay out the Government’s policy towards MMC.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to everybody who has participated in this debate. It has been an extremely useful debate. I particularly commend the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, which answered most of our points and showed clearly that this is not a party-political issue; it is one on which there is consensus on both sides of the House. We all wish this industry to develop well. The points made in the debate highlighted the challenges that everybody involved in providing homes in this country will face to meet the demand that is there already.

I was deeply impressed by the quality of this debate and of the contributions to it. It is very sad that everybody except me and the Front-Bench speakers were limited to two minutes. The quality of the debate that we got in two minutes would, I believe, have gone up exponentially if we had had five or even 10 minutes for contributions.

With that, I thank everybody. It has been a good debate, and one that has taken forward the cause of revolutionising housebuilding in this country.

Motion agreed.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Carrington of Fulham Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 190 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, and the noble Lord, Lord Carrington of Fulham. As we have heard, this amendment has the support of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a whole range of other distinguished bodies with planning expertise. Actually, the amendment is relatively modest and pretty straightforward. It does not reject the idea of creating national development management policies. What it does is simply ensure that these new planning policies result from thoroughgoing consultation, after due publicity, and are subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny. Such a consultative process, with accountability to Parliament just as for the national planning policy statements, would mean that these new NDMPs will have the authority and credibility that otherwise they are likely to lack. I hope the Minister will agree.

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, I too rise to support Amendment 190, to which I have added my name. Your Lordships will be delighted to know that I do not have to speak for very long as everything I was going to say has already been said. The House sounds as though it is unanimous in the view: that there needs to be some sort of constraint on the proposal in this clause, to ensure that there is consultation; that local communities should have primacy in deciding what happens in their area; and that the policy that general consultation should be in the hands of Secretary of State, without the definition of what that consultation should be, is one that no parliamentary assembly should readily accept.

I believe there is a principle in this amendment, that we can trust my noble friend the Minister, and we can probably trust my noble friend the Secretary of State in the other place; but, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, they will change. They will inevitably change. They may change for the better or for the worse; we do not know. But one thing is certain: if you give a power to centralise decision-taking, sooner or later that power will be abused. It is essential to make sure that we do not pass legislation in this House that allows the abuse of power—particularly, the forcing on to local communities of policies that they reject themselves.

It may well be—indeed, I think there is considerable evidence—that our planning laws do not work; we need only look at the problems over the environment, housing and so on. We should absolutely be looking at how our planning laws should be changed and how we should free up, speed up and make less expensive the whole planning process. But the way to do that is not by giving powers to the Secretary of State to override any consultation, any local decision-making and, indeed, the local power of other constitutionally established bodies such as local government.

I support the amendment for a lot of reasons. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that this issue needs greater clarification, that it needs to be properly addressed, that this amendment almost certainly achieves all of that, and that, possibly with a few tweaks from the Government, this amendment could form part of the Bill to everybody’s benefit.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, some issues continue to affect almost everything we do. One is the principle of subsidiarity—that we should ensure that we do not have a system where all power is centred at the top. That was a very important principle that the Popes upheld when dealing with both the Nazis and the communists, saying that both got rid of all the subsidiarity powers and concentrated them at the centre. Of course those people did so because they were, largely, wicked. The trouble is when it is done by people who think it is the best way forward, and that is what I fear here.

The planning system is obviously not good enough. I declare an interest here, having spent almost a whole year trying to turn a house back into the pub that it was before. You would have thought they would have been keen on all that but, my goodness, there are many complications in trying to do it. However, although we recognise this about the planning system, you do not overcome it by putting on top of that system something that is seen by others as being dictatorial. Unless this power is clearly controlled and confined by the parliamentary procedures that enable it to be used in a way that the public will see is subject to democratic control, then I believe it will fail. It is not just a question of it not being suitable, and it is not just a philosophical question; it is that it will not actually work.

One knows what Ministers have been advised to say: the amendment would make the process more difficult, slower and more complex. Well, sometimes doing things more slowly is a good thing because it gives you time to make sure that you get it right. Sometimes making it more complex is necessary because the issue is more complex, and pretending that it is not means that you make a mistake.

I come back to a question that is particularly affecting me at the moment. We have now seen a number of examples where Ministers have said, “It’s not necessary to do this because we’re going to do it anyway”. I remember Ministers who promised us that we would not sign contracts with other nations that undermined our farmers, but we have done precisely that. We have a case at the moment where Ministers said there would be no diminution of environmental protection and therefore we did not need to put it in the Act, but I fear that is precisely what has happened.

I am in the same position here. I am sure that Ministers intend to do the right thing, and I am sure that Ministers coming from any reasonable party might intend to do so, but, as a former Minister of 16 years, I think it was very good for me to have to do the right thing. That is what I think we ought to put here.

Housing (Built Environment Committee Report)

Lord Carrington of Fulham Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. I do not propose to be quite as technical in my speech as he was in his; the expertise that he has brought to this debate is much appreciated.

I start by congratulating and adding my thanks to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, who led our committee; in the context of this debate, I suppose she is best described as our foundation chairman. She did an excellent job on this report and she is now doing an excellent job in her new role as a government Minister. I also add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Moylan on taking over the bed of nails which is the chairmanship of this committee. I wish him all success going forward; based on what he said today in his speech, I have no doubt that he will be there for many years, producing many good reports.

What we learned from this report is that, by general agreement, 300,000 houses a year is required. We are not achieving that. Indeed, we heard a considerable amount of evidence that 300,000 houses a year is not enough; there would need to be 350, 000 or even 400,000 houses a year. That raises some very interesting questions, one of which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, raised in his speech when he mentioned Harold Macmillan and the 1950s housebuilding boom, which was largely concentrated on council housing. That is certainly one solution. The problem with it in the 1950s was the quality of housing that was put up and—as I will come to, a bit, in my speech—the quality of the design of the housing.

I want to take a little digression to one of the problems that, as a London politician, I found in council housing generally, which is that it tends to be a trap for the tenant. The great problem is that, since it is so difficult to change the tenancy for another tenancy, should the tenant wish to go and work somewhere else—or family circumstances require them to go somewhere else—they tend to get trapped in a place that may have been appropriate at the time of the initial tenancy but, over time, becomes inappropriate. It becomes very difficult if family moves away and the tenant becomes isolated. So council housing is not the panacea for everything, although it certainly has parts of the solution.

The real problem in building 300,000 houses a year is of where you are going to build them. That problem has presented our housebuilding with enormous difficulties over the years. I take up the concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill: this really has to be resolved at a local level, because it has to get local acceptance. That is acceptance by not just the local councils but the local people in those areas, because that is where the objections—the rebellion against the imposition of new housing—will come from.

The real question that has to be addressed is: how do you overcome that objection and persuade people that new housing in their area will benefit them? That is extraordinarily difficult, made worse by the fact that where you need to locate 300,000 houses is on the whole where the jobs are, where people consequently already live and where the pressure on housing tends to be already greatest. It is an extraordinarily difficult problem. Any survey you care to do on where we need to put housing will show one of the big areas is the south-east of England, which is the most difficult place to get agreement to put in housing.

I suggest there are lots of reasons why there are objections. One is the impact on local services, obviously. It is about the lack of new roads and new public transport. It is about the lack of schooling and doctors, and of a decent sewerage system, which is so catastrophic in terms of the pollution that we are seeing in neighbourhoods. That needs to be resolved, but I suggest that one of the really big issues is design.

Most of us in this House are old enough to remember that great folk group the Weavers, and when Pete Seeger sang about ticky-tacky “Little Boxes” being built. So much of the modern housing that goes up—even if it is expensive, let alone the cheap modern housing—is either ticky-tacky little boxes or ugly. We used to build beautiful houses, in tune with the time in which they were built. We used to have architects who were able to design housing that people wanted to live in. I will give one example from London’s experience: the Bedford Park estate, which was a great development of the 1880s built by one of our greatest architects, Richard Norman Shaw. It is still desirable to live in, in a rather retro manner. But we need modern Richard Norman Shaws who will, in the modern idiom, design buildings that people want to live in, whether as houses or flats.

We can start doing that by creating houses that people find attractive, and at the same time persuading communities that we are building something which will enhance their community and provide new homes—but do so for local people as well as people coming in from outside, so that the children of the community where the housing is being built can find somewhere to live near their parents or grandparents, while they bring up children and create a community which they can take pride in. If we can do that, we stand a chance of solving this problem. But if we impose from the top housing which is in the wrong place, badly serviced, not near jobs or able to provide access to work, and which is ugly so that people do not want to live in it, we will fail. We have to overcome those problems and make the housing that we are putting up something we can be proud of.