Bridging the gap: Mayor Sadiq Khan urged to consider prefab homes to help ease London's housing shortage
Today Sadiq Khan is being asked to consider freeing up public land and facilitate a boom in prefab construction by the authority’s planning committee and house builders.
Houses built off site in factories could be slotted into small and constrained plots and completed in half the time of traditional builds, according to a report from the Greater London Authority.
Labour’s Nicky Gavron AM, who wrote the report, said prefabs - now commonly referred to as offsite manufactured housing (OSM) - are a “way to close the gap” between supply and demand.
She said: “These buildings are high quality and outstanding in terms of performance. Their construction is more environmentally-friendly than traditional construction methods and they are a far cry from their prefabricated predecessors.
“Few will disagree that using vacant public land to build homes quickly and with less pollution and disruption could be great news for London, tailored to demands at every price point.”
Innovative solutions are needed to reach the target of 50,000 new homes a year, she said, adding that the designs are light-years away from the styles that dominated house-building in the 1970s.
Winston Churchill initially gave the green light for prefab construction as a housing solution for families bombed during the Blitz. In its hey-day in 1968 around 450,000 prefab homes were built across the UK and they contributed significantly to the capital’s post-war housing needs. Today that figure is around 2000, and over the decades they suffered from a reputation of being poor quality.
Builders say OSM homes are cheaper to construct than traditional builds, they are better for the environment and can go up in 20 weeks.
Light-weight designs with shallow foundations also mean they can be built over Tube and railway lines, according to the report.
It also identified that Transport for London owns around 5,700 acres with huge potential for creating new homes.
James Murray, the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development welcomed the report.
He said: “We need to take advantage of innovative ways to boost home building to tackle London’s housing crisis, and a greater use of off-site or precision manufacturing must play a big role.
“The Mayor’s draft London Housing Strategy, which will be published next month, will set out the Mayor’s further plans to support much greater precision manufacturing of homes.”
Twenty-four pre-fab homes were built in Ladywell in Lewisham, with construction starting in November 2015 and the majority of residents moved in August 2016.
Pocket Living built 32 homes in Streatham Hill in 10 months, and are currently building 70 homes in north Lambeth and Europe’s largest modular residential tower at 26 stories (89 homes) in Wandsworth.