Ahead of this year’s Offsite Expo, we spoke to Gaynor Tennant, Founder & Chair of Offsite Alliance, to hear her thoughts on the challenges, and opportunities, facing the industry.
As reported in The King’s Speech, the new Labour government has promised to ‘get Britain building’. Do you think the new government can live up to this promise and address things like the UK housing shortfall?
I think it’s good that they’ve recognised it but there’s a long way to go. Housing is not like any other sector in the construction industry. It’s fraught with challenges everywhere you look, from planning, to clients wanting everything different.
I think the fact the government has recognised that and brought the housing targets back in is a good thing. Whether we’ll ever meet that is another thing.
We’ve got a huge skills shortage that barely gets mentioned in all of this. We’re going to build all these houses, where’s the people to do that and how are you going train them?
There are a few things that could happen with the government that could align, such as the new skills agenda with Skills England that they’ve just launched. Although it’s vast, Skills England have got a huge job to do across all industries.
There’s a lot of things that need to happen in order to get those houses built, but it’s undeniable that we desperately need them.
How do you think the introduction of new powers to metro mayors and local authorities will help impact the offsite construction sector in the next few years?
These local growth plans are a challenge. Generally local authorities wouldn’t have the people around them to be able to develop them. About 63 per cent of local growth plans are out of date with our local authorities. There’s been a lot of research done into if they have updated them, does that make an impact?
I think a lot of it comes down to strong leadership. Places like Sunderland are absolutely leading the way, they’ve done so much work on that local growth plan and how it fits with the schools, the colleges, the infrastructure, the Freeport, and they were the first to get 5G.
There’s a very strong leadership team there and with that long term strategy in place, it should really make a difference.
The industry has the answers, and I ask the government to come and ask the industry who can deliver it and how do we deliver it? Because the local authorities and the housing associations will need so much support if they are to deliver. So really it is about putting a team of people around those local authorities that can come in and support them.
The King’s Speech mentioned tackling the global climate challenge. Where do you see offsite construction’s role in actually tackling climate change?
When you think of offsite, you automatically think it’s more sustainable and it definitely is, particularly in the housing sector. When you look across our housing manufacturers, they are aiming for really high-performing houses.
Offsite does have a huge part to play. If you look at the sustainability and the savings that you can make on transport alone on a construction site.
It’s all about reducing waste as much as possible at every angle. If we can abide by that and everything we do in construction, then we’ll start to see increased productivity and increased sustainability.
Several offsite construction companies have faced financial difficulties over the last few years, either cuts their workforce or going out of business altogether. What would you say that your site sector needs to do to sort of better ensure its financial stability?
It’s been an incredibly tough couple of years for everybody in the construction sector, regardless of what you’re doing. The world has really struggled, not just the UK, everywhere you look that there’s been a real economic downturn.
Those that have gone under have all been housing builders and the majority of them have been big venture capitalist backed ones as well, and that’s a different model. They are looking for a return on investment which has to be very fast and they’re looking to deliver houses very fast through the factory.
House building doesn’t rely on that at the moment, it’s set up in order to deliver very slowly. So I think there’s been a mismatch of business models, knowing your market and knowing the problems you’re going to hit upon.
The government has gone an awful long way in supporting the sector. The amount of money they have put into some of these manufacturers has been substantial, and that’s because they believe in it, it was the right thing to do and it has ultimately grown the sector.
What we need to do now is look at business models that are sustainable but are flexible. In any other business you would look for what happens in an economic downturn, how do you keep your business going?
So I do think a lot of it comes down to knowledge of the sector and business models that have got to change, and we can’t rely on government. It should be up to us as an industry to come together, possibly to standardise, to work collaboratively and really grow our own businesses through doing that.
What are your thoughts on Offsite Expo and what events such as that do to actually support the industry?
They’re really important, events like this. It’s all about people facilitating people getting together to have that conversation. [Offsite Expo] is nice because we get to see all the offsite sector, we know a lot of them and there’s some great products on offer as well.
For Offsite Alliance Expo is a bit different this year. We normally do a stage takeover but this year we’re doing some roundtables. We have been working really closely with Constructing Excellence and the STA. We’ve written five round tables, so the audience can come along, watch, ask questions and participate as well
