Although I primarily went to the Housing Conference to listen to the issues and meet with contacts in the wider housing market, I was buoyed to see a good MMC presence.

Tony Woods and Tim Oakley, both from the LHC, have a wealth of experience of integrating these offsite solutions into their portfolio.  Tony illustrated MMC, offsite, modular, call it what you wish, is not a new concept (and should not be associated with the post-war prefab market!)  Condensing his points:

 - LHC delivered 300,000 houses as far back as 1966 when the Industry Housing report was produced.  A lot of lessons were learnt

 - In part the stigma still associated with this technology can be attributed to the 1980 World in Action documentary on timber frame houses.  The industry dropped from 8% of homes produced to just 4% in a year

 - BRE helped drive this figure up and now has over 500 manufacturers on their approved list

 - The Amphion report of 2001 attempted to drive a consortium of 30 providers to speed up affordable housing.  It failed

 - There is the Kate Barker report of 2004 (where the 300,000 homes were born) and Advantage South West's development of 4,000 houses

 - In 2014, after the Buildoffsite "Offsite Housing Review", LHC developed their first framework.  This did not stop KPMG highlighting that in 2014 70% of houses built were attributed to the large builders

 - In their 2015 report, EC Harris concluded that 25% of all new homes needed to be built using MMC (in part due to skill shortages and affordability).  This would drive the then 152,000 homes developed to 190,000

 - In 2015 Laing O'Rourke announced plans to build a MMC factory, closely followed by L&G

 - And then of course there was the Farmer Review of 2016


In a separate post I have highlighted some of the lessons learnt - please see "Offsite lessons learnt according to LHC"