Off-site Manufacture for Construction (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Patel and his committee on a very thorough benchmarking report. The House will know of my interest as a practising chartered surveyor, which also involves the construction sector. I have also had the privilege of serving on an ad hoc parliamentary committee on government policy for the built environment, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain. The House will also know of some of my activities in the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Excellence in the Built Environment, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, will know, have considerably informed my views on many of the things that have already been raised.

I draw on some 40 years’ involvement in various parts of the construction cycle but remain, I am afraid, very much at the muddy-boot level, although I begin to feel my age as I weekly shin up and down scaffolding on construction sites. I distinguish straightaway the existing bulk of traditional construction that forms our existing building stock and concentrate, as the committee does, on new build and where we go from here. I have witnessed, over my professional life, the growing use of component standardisation and off-site assembly, as the noble Lord, Lord Mair, so eloquently put it. I have also visited manufacturing facilities where entire floors of houses, which could be stacked on top of each other, were produced. I do not know how they moved them down the road, but that was another story.

Among the physical limitations of prefabrication is the size of components that can be conveniently transported to sites. However, in the realms of moving to robotics and 3D printing, who knows where we might be in a relatively short time in respect of distributed fabrication of components? The committee rightly referred to the limitations in current construction practices and the different approaches that would be needed, from design to completion, for procuring buildings with substantial off-site content. While many of them—hotels, some municipal buildings, schools, student accommodation and so on—are becoming, as we speak, early candidates for this type of work, the low-rise residential housing sector has been flagged up as a potential sticking point. This is mainly because changes in style, layout and space might place standardisation in the way of customisation, particularly, post-occupation adaption. I shall say more about that in a minute, although I believe that many of these points are perceptions rather than reality, and that, fundamentally, we are on to a good thing here and we should go with it.

There will always be a market for the one-off self-build of conventional construction. Needless to say, we have plenty of conventional construction already in place, but we will progressively get to a degree of standardisation of components, which can be arranged in multiple different ways to achieve a wide range of different designs and styles. I do not absolve current traditional methods of constructing dwellings from some significant criticisms of monotony and sameness. So let us not compare the bad bits too much. If we can get innovative design and exterior appearance into off-site construction, we will start to overcome some of the prejudices that sit against this particular form of creating buildings.

We must not forget that many of our best-loved residential street scenes are partly the result of standardisation of design and the way in which things have been put together. That has not prevented a degree of customisation by successive owners, who, as we know, love to tinker with their houses. We have retail superstores devoted to catering for their every need in that respect.

However, there are some key considerations to all this. First, a dwelling is not just a commodity; it is also a home on which occupiers may rightly wish to stamp their own mark as an expression of character and aspiration. Exhaustive design risks denying that, which has consequences for value and personal commitment to a very important investment asset—someone’s own home. We should not forget that. Where changes by owners take place, they can cause significant damage to the building’s performance. I think of the many cases I have come across over many years of puncturing of vapour barriers or cutting away structural elements to accommodate alterations.

Longevity of what we produce must be part of the deal. The fact that a new building might have a constructional life of 50 years instead of 200 is a criticism I have heard levied against modern construction. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Young, referred to that. We should regard that very critically, because savings made today on cost-cutting merely bring forward costs for tomorrow. I wonder whether there might not be a different way of making a cost comparison—for instance, by using something that was not money-based but an energy accounting method. Along the line, with our discounts and jam today versus jam tomorrow, we have led ourselves astray. Durability is vital, and buildings need to be constructed with future maintenance costs in mind. That to some extent governs the choice of components and materials.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Excellence in the Built Environment, in its 2016 report, More Homes, Fewer Complaints, made a number of recommendations, of which better supervision of on-site works was one. Off-site construction might deal with some of these issues, but by no means all. I have a particular bugbear, which is premature component obsolescence, with its obvious implication for future downstream costs simply because the production run of whatever it was has ceased a long time since. I think of the recessed low-energy light syndrome, where the starter unit and the electronics do not outlast the first set of bulbs. That is a fundamental failure and we should not allow it.

Hypothecation of components to a particular manufacturer or product line also brings its own risk. What do you do later when you need to repair something or replace an element? Composite elements manufactured off site and then put together need to be repairable. That means having some system with capacity to create them. The more elaborate and all-encompassing the off-site component in terms of its engineering content, the more that matters. I shall give a particular example, if I may.

A couple of years ago, I was called to inspect a zero-energy home constructed of composite panels made of insulation material between a sandwich of some sort of particleboard. It had an external cement render in what appeared to be a single coat with no joins and looked very smart. You could not fault the design but, somewhere along the line, the outlet for the roof drainage leaked. Lo and behold, the leakage was directly above some of the composite panels; these proceeded to rot as part of their component—namely timber—was biodegradable. To get them out, special panels had to be ordered. This was done under a building warranty; had it been a few years later, there would have been no such warranty. This sort of thing brings our construction industry into a degree of disrepute.

I recall that, many years ago, something related to timber-framing caught the wrong side of the television press. Noble Lords will remember: it was a celebrated case in which timber-frame panels were stacked on site but not protected or prevented from getting damp or maltreated. This nearly brought down the company in question; it caused mortgage lenders to refuse to lend against modern timber-framed structures for several years thereafter and caused significant disruption to a perfectly good and legitimate method of construction. We need to make sure that we have future-proofed as many of these things as we can. On-site techniques will have to change, not least in handling. As I said, bad news affects perception in a much more potent way than the actual defect probably warrants. That is information for you, and it is getting worse.

I see the process of off-site construction as part of a journey. It will become an increasingly significant component of everything we do. I welcome the Government’s response to this. I should like to reinforce what has been said about fragmentation, contract and payment arrangements—all the other things raised by the Farmer report.

I make a plea: construction and engineering is not seen by young people as a career they might like to go for; we ought to reverse that situation—construction and engineering is a fabulous career path. I draw attention also to the fact that very few young women are attracted to this sector; that is another waste of resources.

I finish by repeating my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and his committee on an excellent job of work, and express my appreciation to the Government for their very positive response.