As part of the forthcoming Offsite Expo, Anne Daw, Head of MMC Delivery at HLM Architects, will be a key participant in the Infrastructure Masterclass, examining the integration of MMC within the justice and defence sectors and exploring how these fields benefit from standardised designs and modular approaches.

Since joining HLM in 2009, Anne has contributed her expertise across various sectors, including education, residential, and defence. Her projects have ranged from schools and university buildings to residential flats and defence estate masterplans.

In recent years, Anne has focused on the education sector, leveraging her extensive knowledge of offsite construction. She has been instrumental in supporting several research and development projects that span multiple sectors, demonstrating her commitment to advancing the field of architecture.

Ahead of the Expo, we caught up with Anne, to get her thoughts on the themes of the show.

Anne Daw

As part of Offsite Expo, you’re chairing a masterclass on infrastructure from the point of view of justice and defence. Can you tell us more about what to expect from that session?

We’ve had a great breadth of topics come up this year, so I’m really pleased that this one has come up. It’s a great opportunity for projects where you’ve got a single client and a standardised design to really capitalise on the benefits of MMC and really push the boundaries.

We’ve been engaging with that sort of development, starting with the DfE on school design over the course of many years from our original standardised baseline design that that HLM developed for them in 2012, through the development of output specifications and the MMC framework designs.

At the same time we were working with the MoJ and MoD using offsite construction, and we could see how that platform design that was evolving in the DfE could really evolve as well in the MoJ and MoD to deliver better quality buildings more quickly and more efficiently.

But we’ve now focused that effort in those sectors in two very different but equally effective ways. The single living accommodation in the Ministry of Defence and the prisons for the Department for Justice.

They really have very little in common in terms of design, as you’d expect. The performance requirements are different, the building layouts are different, the materials, etcetera. They’re completely different. But what they do have in common is a repetition of room types.

And that means a kit of parts can be optimised and created for each, and that repetition can drive efficiencies in the design and delivery. And that’s very important when we’re also looking to meet sustainability goals and facing labour and skills shortages in construction.

This masterclass session at Offsite Expo is going to look at what the industry has been doing to increase capacity in the past and how we can deliver that infrastructure, knocking down some obstacles we’ve had to date and really look at delivering those results with more urgency for the sectors.

The ability to do more with less is really key to meeting our productivity requirements and the new government has already raised the issue of prisons nearing capacity.

We’re going to have to really step it up another notch and we’re going to need to deliver more with less.

What are some of the barriers to implementing offsite construction and what are some of the risks involved that you that you have witnessed when working with clients?

I think we’ve started to move past the initial distrust of offsite that we might have seen in the past. The industry has worked very hard at moving away from being defined by temporary buildings, and at demonstrating how they can achieve and surpass the quality of traditional construction.

We recently finished a research project with what was Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), now called Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and we looked at those barriers to offsite in a lot of detail with quite a large stakeholder engagement.

We found that the quality is not a barrier like it used to be, but now the perception of risk lies in the systems around the building development process and in our collective habitual ways of working. So that applies to everyone down the chain, from clients to designers, planners, procurement, insurance and warranty providers, and even inspectors on site.

Any change from that is often viewed as a risk, so even when it might be a benefit, that perception of change is synonymous with risk.

There’s more education around that perception of risk that we need to work on, and at some level, the offsite industry has really asked for asked for too much change in the way we’ve traditionally developed and designed buildings by asking for really early engagement, full buy-in from the client from the very beginning, and asking clients and project managers to just trust that those upfront costs are going to be more than made-up for by savings down the road.

But that perception of risk can be a really big barrier to choosing MMC in the first place and that’s what we find with our clients when we when we design buildings and take that to them as an option.

But these aren’t insurmountable risks, so we can start to tear them down and make it easier for people to trust MMC as construction methodology. If we can develop digital tools to realign the offsite process more closely with traditional processes for development, and this is like what we developed with MHCLG.

I think there’s another risk that we should probably address, because there’s been a lot of publicity about the difficult situations caused by failures of offsite manufacturers in the last couple of years and we have seen a lot of questions arise around this issue.

I want to stress that I don’t think that offsite manufacturers are any more prone to failure than traditional contractors.

There’s been recorded failures of all types of contractors in the last few years, particularly traditional contractors, but when a traditional contractor fails, the system carries on and a new builder can often just pick up where the last one has left off.

We know how to deal with that, but offsite is different in that we’re asking people to spend money upfront to develop a design in detail, well in advance of construction, and we’re asking them to optimise that design to fit a specific manufacturer to drive those efficiencies.

But that introduces a single point of failure to the client, and it asks them to take on the risk that if that failure happens, if that manufacturer goes under, the design has to be revisited and adapted to fit a new manufacturers process at their own cost.

If that is something that affects their planning approval, for example, it introduces significant delay and will probably make the project fail altogether. So this requirement that we’ve created to make design bespoke to a single manufacturer is a significant barrier to clients because there’s actually some risk that they could have a significant problem.

What we developed with the MHCLG digital design tools was a process to make designs interoperable to multiple manufacturers without narrowing your supply chain, and that takes that single point of failure away. These digital tools can really help us get over these barriers.

How would you define the industry’s progression of adopting MMC?

HLM was quite an early adopter of MMC and promoted that principle of designing every building with DfMA from the beginning, because it’s something that can’t easily be shoehorned in at a later stage.

That change to the way people are working has not really been an easy one and it’s one that we’re constantly challenged to maintain.

But we’re feeling a little bit of softness in that aspect now and I think people are more willing to entertain a DfMA approach, particularly to drive environmental benefits that come with MMC construction.

In the awards that I judged this year, there were some really fantastic entries in the categories that I judged and I think it’s a reflection that the industry is getting our heads around the fact that designing for offsite isn’t about designing for traditional construction and then finding out you’re over budget and up against a programme, and let’s see if we can shoe-horn an offsite provider to get us out of trouble. It’s not about that.

There are key decisions that you make at the very early stage of a project that make a massive difference to the design and the ability to deliver it off site. And we’re starting to see that the designs are more considered, and look less like adaptations, and more like they’re embracing DfMA principles from the very beginning to create much more thoughtful design results.

And I can’t wait to see the winning projects and meet the delivery teams at the Expo in September.