好色先生TV

Most people working in the housebuilding industry would not know a SIP from a pod 鈥� and most don't have to. Off-site build technology such as structural insulated panels and bathroom pods have been something of a rarity, applied on one-off projects purely for the sake of on-site R&D.

But could the technology, as well as the vocabulary, of housebuilding be set to change?

Former housing minister Lord Falconer saw modular housing as the answer to the housing problems of key workers; others see off-site build technology as the solution to other challenges 鈥� skills shortages, the Egan agenda, ever more demanding building regulations and the quest for quality improvement.

"We are now acting as innovation consultant to quite a number of registered social landlords," says Darren Richards, operations director of technology consultant MTech Group. "The vast majority of our housing work is in the social and key-worker sector. Not a lot is coming from the private housebuilding industry."

"We now have a succession of projects," says Peter Jenkins, national account manager with modular building maker Yorkon. Like MTech, Yorkon is working primarily with RSLs, notably supplying the Peabody Trust's Murray Grove and Raines Dairy schemes in London, although it is hoping to land a contract with a private housebuilder later this year.

This ongoing activity has convinced Yorkon to dedicate a production line to manufacturing modules purely for housing projects, although it acknowledges that the housebuilding industry has not yet learned to love prefab.

"After Murray Grove, we were inundated with people coming to us and asking us to modularise schemes, but that is not the way to do it," says Jenkins. "Developers have to come to us with a clean sheet of paper and buy in to the process. Before Murray Grove, about 10% of the profession were prepared to get an understanding of what we were doing. Now it is 25%, but that still leaves 75% who are not prepared to understand."

"Things are changing," agrees innovation consultant Tony Redhead, whose company, Redex Consultancy, helped bring Dutch technology to Southern Housing Group's Nightingale Estate project in Hackney, east London. "But change is slow because people are afraid of bearing the cost of lower productivity while they go through the learning curve of new systems. Contractors' quantity surveyors are too inclined to just look at cost per item."

Hand in hand with the gradual increase in demand is coming a more rapid increase in supply of technology. UK building products companies are now more eager to introduce new systems, many of which have been available overseas for years.

"We couldn't have brought the Jamera prefab system here five years ago 鈥� the environment then was different," says Ian Exall, marketing manager of aircrete blockmaker H+H Celcon, which is about to start UK production of the aircrete floor and wall panel system that its Finnish counterparts have been selling for 20 years.

"It's a turnaround from two to three years ago when people didn't have a choice," says MTech's Richards. "We have just carried out an analysis of light-steel framing and found 11 companies capable of supplying to housing projects. There is so much motivation and drive coming out of the steel frame sector." And costs, he says are coming down.

Yet in spite of this improved climate of innovation, the most common off-site build technology, timber-frame, has failed to increase its share of the market in England from around 10%. "It has been there since 1999 and has remained relatively static," says Geoff Pitts, technical director of innovation consultant the Palmer Partnership.

"It is possible that there has been no more capacity in timber-frame factories to produce more," he adds by way of possible explanation. If that has been the bottleneck, then it is easing. Stewart Milne has just opened a 4000-unit-a-year capacity factory in Witney, Oxfordshire, and both Westbury Homes' Space4 factory and Partnerships First's Torwood2 works are gradually stepping up their production lines. Canadian timber-frame producers are mounting a campaign to enter the UK market, backed by their government. A new UK timber-frame initiative, the Homes Factory, is looking to satisfy demand on smaller sites by establishing small locally based micro-factories, to offer the quality of factory build without the cost penalty of big factory overheads.

But before you rush out and cancel your order for blocks and replace it with one for steel or timber frame, it is worth heeding the advice of prefabrication's pioneers. "It is not simply a matter of replacing one material with another," says Robin Davies, the Westbury Homes board director responsible for Space4. "The biggest challenge is in integrating the new process of building the shell with the old processes of the site."

The housebuilder is now doing its first "continuous build" projects, but the process is not yet seamless. "We've found that in one or two areas of the country we used all the scaffolding available because we needed so much over a short time," says Davies. "So now we are looking at ways of putting up the shell without scaffolding, working with the HSE and others. This is just the first generation. We're taking the whole construction process forward."

It seems learning the difference between a SIP and a pod could therefore just be the start.