Government to provide invcentives to boost off-site construction

Ministers are preparing a raft of incentives to deliver more than 100,000 modular homes to help tackle the housing crisis.

A white paper due out next month will include measures to encourage banks to lend to firms which construct homes off-site before delivering them to their final destination, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

Ministers hope modular construction can make a big contribution towards hitting its target of building one million new homes by 2020.

The industry has been investing heavily in modular construction in recent years, with investor Legal & General and contractor Laing O’Rourke among the early major players.

Housing and planning minister Gavin Barwell said: “Offsite construction could provide a huge opportunity to increase housing supply and we want to see more innovation like this emulated across the housebuilding sector.

“The £3bm Home Building Fund will help build more than 225,000 new homes and provide loans for small firms, custom builders, offsite construction and essential infrastructure, creating thousands of new jobs in the process.”

Earlier this month both Barwell and Ed Lister, chair of the Homes and Communities Agency, said they were exploring ways of encouraging a wider range of firms to build homes, with Lister saying he wanted companies to come forward even if they had no prior housebuilding experience.

Building also revealed the first prototypes from investor Legal & General’s mammoth modular housing factory in Yorkshire will roll off the production line by the end of the year.

Topics