Committee's doubts over offsite savings

An Office of the Deputy Prime Minister committee has criticised the use of offsite manufacturing to address the housing shortage.
The Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee said it doubted that offsite manufacturing is less expensive than traditional construction methods.
Traditional Housing Bureau executive director Barry Holmes said offsite construction methods cost between 12% and 20% more than traditional construction methods. "You need 40,000 units-a-year to make it effective. It's very much a manual process."
However, Graham Raven, sustainability group senior manager of the Steel Construction Institute, said: "We haven't yet seen the benefits coming through of critical mass and the economics of scale."
The report said offsite manufacturing could address a shortage of skilled labour on construction sites.
But Holmes said construction firms need to improve working conditions to attract skilled workers. "There's an urban myth that there's a skills shortage in masonry, propagated by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - it sees all modern construction as offsite manufacturing."