6. Homing in on Excellence - a commentary on the use of offsite fabrication methods for the UK housebuilding industry, The Housing Forum, London, 2002, page 33.

7. Homing in on Excellence, page 33.

8. Rethinking Construction, the report of the Construction Task Force chaired by Sir John Egan, DETR, London, 1998, page 18.

9. The Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, John Prescott MP, foreword to Quality of Life Counts - Indicators for a Strategy for Sustainable Development for the United Kingdom: A Baseline Assessment, DETR, London, 1999, page 4.

10. Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory B Lovins and L Hunter Lovins, Factor Four - Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use, Earthscan Publications, London, 1997, Introduction, page xxviii.

11. Rethinking Construction, page 40.

12. Tom Whatling, Environmental Manager, Gleeson Homes, speaking at The Pre-Fabulous Home.

13. Tom Whatling, speaking.

14. Andrew Scoones of The Building Centre Trust in conversation with Ian Abley after The Pre-Fabulous Home.

15. Homing in on Excellence, page 14.

16. Homing in on Excellence, page 14.

Tom Whatling graduated as a Geologist from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1983.

He started work as a graduate management trainee with Redland Aggregates, before developing a career in Technical Management as a Materials Engineer, firstly with Stangers and then with Christiani & Nielsen.

Tom moved to Bardon Aggregates in 1990 where he worked as Quality Manager before moving into Environmental and Health & Safety Management in 1992.

He joined Gleeson Homes in May 2001 as Environmental Manager with the task to develop the environmental management system and assist the Division gain certification to ISO 14001, which was achieved in November 2001.

Current work focuses on maintaining the environmental profile and improvements in resource and waste management.

The Pre-Fabulous Home Continued from page 1

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As John Miles appreciated in his clear presentation, we need a rethinking of construction through capital investment because house builders are failing to supply sufficient quantities of housing of a high enough quality, despite the best efforts of many product manufacturers. If planning were eased, the backward house builders would be exposed.

'Currently the rate of production of houses is largely governed by the ability of the planning system to deliver sites capable of development. The planning system effectively "rations" the production of new houses, and the traditional construction industry is structured to build the number of houses permitted. If the number of planning permissions increased, in a move towards meeting demand, the industry as it stands at the moment would be hard pressed to cope.' (6)

Yet strangely the lifting of planning restrictions was not seen as a spur to off site fabrication (OSF) by The Housing Forum. There is an awkward reluctance in Homing in on Excellence to consider the potential of low density and independently serviced manufactured housing, because it is definitely not planning policy to allow farmers needing to retire from their heavily subsidised industry to sell redundant farmland for development. Miles set the tone by focussing on The Pre-Fabulous Urban Home as a stackable volumetric system. There was no willingness to imagine that another, perhaps more viable market for OSF might exist, without the debilitating restriction on land supply that also frustrates site based housing development.

The audience appeared to share the confidence of The Housing Forum that '… the government's avowed intent to increase densities and redevelop existing sites rather than build in the country, together with the resistance inevitably met from adjoining occupiers, may allow OSF to make redevelopment more palatable.' (7) The prefabricated housing envisaged was to be stacked high, but Miles certainly did not believe that should be done cheaply or unimaginatively.

There may be a looming housing crisis, but Miles is not alone in considering it resolvable if only government would push OSF in the service of the accepted urban agenda at considerable public expense. There is no alternative it seems for policymakers, such as allowing households to find living space in rural areas, perhaps on condition that the homes are an approved product, at the minimal cost of easing planning policy by setting farmers free.

The Housing Forum has accepted the urban presumption that sustainable development means conserving the countryside as a largely uninhabited place.

Where Homing in on Excellence is more thoughtful in escaping the narrowness of ideas about sustainability is in realising that both resource efficiency and labour productivity are essential in manufacturing. Under Sir John Egan, the Construction Task Force report of 1998 - Rethinking Construction - had noted that up to 30% of site based construction was rework to correct poor workmanship or design. Site based labour was being managed at between 40 to 60% of potential productivity given the level of technology employed. Accidents accounted for 3 to 6% of total project costs and at least 10% of materials were wasted. (8) This pathetic performance was and still is be improved upon by adopting OSF across the construction industry.

However, since the Egan report the advocates of sustainable development have demonstrated an obsession with saving materials or energy, rather than addressing the human cost of wasted time in a needlessly arduous and hazardous site based industry. The one-sidedness that Miles avoids was underwritten by the same government that had earlier commissioned Egan. In the foreword to the DETR report Quality of Life Counts - Indicators for a Strategy for Sustainable Development for the United Kingdom John Prescott indicated that low-growth and labour intensive work was government environmental policy.

'In the past, focus has centred mainly on improving labour productivity. In the future, greater emphasis will be needed on resource efficiency. We need to break the link between continued economic growth and increasing use of resources and environmental impacts.' (9)

The Quality of Life Counts report acknowledges the influence of Factor Four. Though Factor Four admitted technological change, the argument was still one of self-imposed limits in application.

'The economic boost from saving resources could thus erode the savings' benefits, if not channelled into a different pattern of development that encourages the substitution of people for physical resources.' (10)

Capital intensive and resource efficient OSF appears optional to advocates of sustainability, and not an immediate priority. So regardless of the professional imagination, sustainable design defaults to marginally modernised site based building methods, still reliant on laborious work to make material savings. It seems as though The Housing Forum has once again appreciated that our aim should be to reduce the labour time required to produce products across society to minimal levels, and in the process realise resource efficiencies through the scale and technical sophistication of production.

In failing to learn the lesson of the Egan report, to make the most of the workforce through capital intensive manufacturing, the tendency has been to say that Egan is wrong.

'To summarise, the Task Force wishes to emphasise that we are not inviting UK construction to look at what it does already and do it better: we are asking the industry and Government to join with major clients to do it entirely differently. What we are proposing is a radical change in the way we build. We wish to see, within five years, the construction industry deliver its products to its customers in the same way as the best consumer-led manufacturing and service industries. To achieve the dramatic increases in efficiency and quality that are both possible and necessary we must all rethink construction.' (11)

Not merely to think about one aspect of the problems of construction, such as the waste of materials, but to solve all the problems of site based contracting together by producing buildings differently. It was consequently inspired programming to follow the appreciation of the full potential of OSF from John Miles with the resource efficiency obsessions of Environmental Management. Tom Whatling developed the Gleeson Homes Environmental Management System, gaining certification to ISO 14001 in November 2001. He maintains the environmental profile of Gleeson Homes by improving resource and waste management on site.

Whatling's presentation was engaging, but perfectly demonstrated the one-sidedness of making huge efforts on site to save and recycle a marginal amount of building materials. It was unsurprising that contractors'… see waste as a cost'. (12) A waste of materials it is not one sensibly avoided by wasting labour, unless of course, from the employer's point of view, you have managed to get the operatives to give their time for free. Like most construction managers Whatling has learnt the manufacturing industry phraseology of Egan, and earnestly talks about sustainability, but is simply about the penny-pinching business of saving materials without losing tight control of site labour costs.

This scratching about reducing material waste in the name of environmental responsibility is as far as it is possible to get from the factory based labour productivity and systematised resource efficiencies that capital investment in OSF will afford.

Whatling asked '… how do you make waste interesting to designers?' (13) The answer is by making waste reduction an inseparable aspect of design devoted to raising levels of quality production off site. Otherwise waste reduction is a site based chore, and will not impact on designers significantly while most materials on site are oversized for non-standard cutting.

The strength of Homing in on Excellence is that it appreciates the Egan report was never about making contractors or construction managers behave like production engineers because they can't do it. Their inability to improve the product substantially is not necessarily a personal incapacity, but due to the fact of building on site in a fragmented industry. OSF products are by definition made in a factory, or assembled cleanly somewhere by people familiar with the system. As Andrew Scoones of The Building Centre Trust noted after the seminar, '… I do not necessarily accept that OSF necessarily means better skilled craftsmen. In fact it might be quite the opposite'. (14) OSF will allow operatives to narrowly specialise in the overall process so that accuracy and speed in a repetitive activity becomes more important than possessing a trade skill for all site eventualities. OSF management will then be able to systematise the production process through to site installation, providing task related training to operatives at any stage in a committed production run. Management is entirely different on site.

While bad site management can do nothing but compound low productivity and poor quality, it is hard for good project managers to improve the accuracy and speed of individual site tradesmen in the middle of a programme.

No car manufacturer would attempt to assemble a car on your drive, and no car salesman would need to argue that the panels were aligned within tolerance, because they would have never left the factory unless they were. Meanwhile every material off-cut during fabrication would have been designed out, reused, or recycled as a matter of course, without wasting the time of valuable operatives. In a factory the Gleeson Homes attempt to save materials would seem obvious, while the time spent in sorting off-cuts by hand for collection would be recognised as a laborious waste - a waste of time and skill that the construction industry must avoid if production volume and standards are both to increase.

'The twin pressures of a reducing skill-base and increasing demand, plus government encouragement to innovate, have combined to drive the UK housebuilding industry in search of new methods of delivery. The historic build rate has varied over the last 30-40 years with current build rates stable at a relative low.' (15)

'Statistics on education and training within the housebuilding sector show an alarming decline in candidates for the skilled trades and construction-related higher education… It must be concluded that the industry will be unable to meet projected demand if it remains anchored to conventional methods of production.' (16)

Miles was bold in suggesting that a companion policy to establishing OSF might be to allow greater freedom of movement for migrant construction labour. Relaxation of immigration controls will be all the more necessary should capital investment in OSF not be realised.

The government is unable to face up to the fact that obstructions to immigration are not only socially divisive and debilitating, but frustrate even the inadequate amount of site based construction that manages to get built. If a workforce for increased construction output is to be secured the international labour market must be allowed to flourish, and OSF for Miles would additionally improve the prospects and conditions for productive work. Ian Abley 31 July 2002

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