The Two Big Obstacles to Offsite and MMC Adoption

It’s hard to know what else can be done to make the case in favour of offsite construction. KPMG conducted a major study some years ago, and then we had the Farmer Review. The House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee came out strongly in favour of offsite, and the Independent Review of Build Out by Sir Oliver Letwin highlighted how offsite helps overcome the challenges of materials shortages, availability of skilled labour, and constrained logistics on site.

Furthermore, offsite construction has proven its worth in terms of cost, quality, timing and environmental impact. We are not talking about theoretical gains for some time in the future, they are real, and they are available today.

Policy and Practical Behaviour

And yet, offsite and MMC remain rather at the fringes – despite the government’s presumption in favour of offsite construction in publicly funded projects. There seems to be a gulf between top-level political will and behaviour on the ground. In the eight months since the presumption in favour of offsite came into practical effect, three out of five affected departments placed no contracts involving offsite work and one placed just a single contract.

Two significant obstacles remain. One is risk-averse procurement that seems, perversely, to favour the ‘known’ likelihood of delays, budget overruns and quality issues that come with traditional builds. These are the problems that procurers say they want to eliminate yet there is resistance to specifying something more reliable.

It’s a trait of human nature that behaviour is hard to change and that something you have no direct experience of always seems riskier – no matter how much evidence exists to the contrary.

This level of risk-aversion also spreads to the insurance industry. Partly this is down to lack of familiarity and partly it’s down to confusion over different types of offsite construction, and the relevance of different perceived risks to different methods.

In the case of panelised offsite systems such as iSIP and iFAST, there is all the test data you need to verify both durability and fire safety. The obstacles in procurement and insurance are largely about perception, which will only be overcome by maintaining a more open mind.

If you want to know more about the practicalities of panelised offsite construction, take a look at our case studies here.