Standardisation Is Becoming Essential to Affordable Housing Delivery

Written by: Ben Townend, Design and Technical Lead, Great Places Housing Group.

Great Places is an ambitious Northwest sector-leader in the development of new affordable homes, making a significant contribution to addressing the housing crisis.

Our completed MMC projects suitably demonstrate the benefits we can deliver on behalf of our customers in-terms of lower defects, improved indoor environment quality, and lower energy bills through industrialised construction.

Our experience and learning to date of MMC delivery clearly evidence that increasing PMV and limiting variation in systems and components has a direct impact on the likelihood of achieving our project outcomes, focussed on the enhanced certainty of operational performance, environmental impact, and customer experience.

Whilst we advocate for site specific approaches for elements such as housing typologies, elevational treatments, and roof designs, to deliver high quality communities and places, we aim to reduce unnecessary or hidden variations which add complexity and cost.

The standardisation and repeatability of the design and specification of home layouts, core home areas such as kitchens and bathrooms, structural systems, and elemental system build-ups is a key tool in achieving improved project outcomes in terms of building performance, enhanced quality of homes and improved delivery certainty.

Through a rational and performance focussed approach to design and delivery of new homes we need to leverage consistent designs and specifications to make the most efficient use of available materials and resources.

Standardisation can drive our projects towards higher performance and quality with greater certainty and consistency, something which is particularly important to us as a Housing Provider in the context of the ongoing housing crisis.

Through engagement with housing manufacturers, contractors and industry professionals we support an approach which utilises a baseline specification, with standard details for thermal junctions and elemental build-ups, applied to standard house types to enhance commonality and consistency, boosting efficiency and reliability and reducing the potential for any performance gap in occupation.

Collaboration remains key to fully realise the potential benefits of standardised design which remains sensitive to local requirements. Early engagement with experts in the supply chain and delivery space ensure we can continue to innovate and adapt our approach to housing delivery to achieve high performing, future proofed homes at scale.