Housing: Modular Construction

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 8th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

On my noble friend’s last point, that is exactly what we are doing: we are encouraging all the time through investment and support to help housebuilding. On other issues of building public buildings in particular, we want to encourage the take-up of MMC across the whole range of traditional building sites. We can do that by sharing across government. We have introduced a presumption in favour of MMC in our capital programmes, such as within the Department for Education’s school rebuilding programme and the Ministry of Defence accommodation programme. Significant progress has been made on schools and prisons programmes, and we are using those examples of best practice to help shape future policy for MMC.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, in the social housing sector, Legal & General stopped production on the basis that there was an insufficient pipeline of orders and it had had six years of losses. What discussions are the Government having with the social housing sector to see whether modular construction can contribute not just to owner occupation but to dealing with a very serious shortage of social housing?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

As I have said, it is across all sectors. We need to support the MMC sector to increase the amount of housing across the board, whether that be private, affordable or social rented.