Are prefab homes too depressing? Matt Cardy/Getty Images
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“Lovely, isn’t it?” I’m standing in the kitchen with a resident of Lockleaze, Bristol, as we survey the construction site just a few yards from the end of her garden. She is, of course, being sarcastic. “I’m just so depressed,” she says more sincerely, her sentiment echoed by the dull clanking of a drill in the distance. From an upstairs window we see an expanse of diggers, mud, and houses in various states of completion, building works that have disrupted this neighbourhood for almost three years — even as other developments in the area have started and finished. And when they are finally done, the new homes will be so close to hers that she worries about privacy and safety. “They’ll see right into my garden. Someone could just hop over the fence.”
Her immediate neighbour has already moved to escape the new estate. In the next house along there is an old man who grew up in this part of northern Bristol, and who remembers when the land now under development, a half-kilometre strip of green space called Bonnington Walk, was graced by roe deer, horses and vegetable allotments. My interviewee would settle for some sparrows. “I used to have all kinds of birds here,” she says. “Now I just get magpies and pigeons.”
There is an enormous irony in this fiasco. Bonnington Walk was meant to be a showcase for a faster, greener and cheaper way of building homes, known as modular construction or “modern methods of construction”. A more familiar term would be prefab. The houses and apartments are factory-built in sections, and then transported to site for assembly. For its champions, modular construction holds the key to addressing Britain’s housing crisis. The government has been promoting prefab as a means to achieve its ever-elusive target of 300,000 new homes annually, and has supported the industry with hundreds of millions of pounds in funding over the last five years.
The nightmare at Bonnington Walk suggests these hopes are still a long way from being realised. In 2021, the masterplan for 185 prefabs won a prize at the Housing Design Awards. The following autumn, the CEO of the Legal & General Modular Homes, the manufacturer behind the project, visited the site to announce “a housebuilding revolution”. Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees hailed the development as evidence that the city could “build affordable housing” while also tackling “the climate emergency”. And yet, last summer, prospective buyers were told that the newly assembled houses would be dismantled again due to faulty foundations. An indignant local man described how a convoy of low-loaders had come to remove the ill-fated homes. “Can you imagine how much that cost? Must be millions!” His take on the whole affair was scathing: “totally incompetent.”
To make matters worse, Legal & General announced last spring that it would be winding down its prefab venture, citing a lack of demand. It has reported losses of £235 million since 2016. And this is not an isolated case: two further modular housebuilders, Ilke Homes and Urban Splash, went into administration last year. Both had received millions of pounds of taxpayer support, some of which the government has promised to claw back. Legal & General says it will still deliver the homes at Bonnington Walk, but the woman living next to the site told me an entire row of the prefabs had yet to reappear. Strangely, the building going up just beyond her garden fence was made of old-fashioned concrete bricks.
Do these failures simply reflect teething problems in the prefab industry, or are they indicative of a flawed concept? Some modular homes are being completed in the UK, delivered by firms such as the Wee House Company and Boklok, a Swedish partnership between Ikea and modular specialist Skanska. Another manufacturer, TopHat, will this year open Europe’s biggest prefab factory in Corby, Northamptonshire, with investment from Aviva and Goldman Sachs. But so far, the houses are arriving at a drip — a few hundred here, a few hundred there. There is no sign of the glorious future envisioned by prefab boosters: an abundance of affordable housing, built by robots on production lines, customised for the preferences of every consumer, and ready for move-in a week after ordering.
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SubscribePrefab isn’t the ultimate solution, but it certainly can play a big role. It’s baffling how the initiative got so mucked up in Bristol.
The current planning system – with its combination of individual home approvals and reduced number of planners – guarantees shortages, delays and lack of innovation. This forces prices up and quality down. We need to switch to a simpler and faster planning system based on zoning and limited but enforced building regulations – as in many other countries. The success of the Docklands shows what is possible when restrictions ease. The current situation suits both builders and existing home owners, of course, so one should not expect progress anytime soon.
So would a system which allowed more self-build. People building their own homes care more about build quality. The planning “system” is a disgrace.
But another article about housing which fails to acknowledge the basic law of supply and demand. The government-backed cheap money pumping up prices (together with endless state-backed price support and subsidy schemes like “help to buy”). And the massive population increase. Both unforced errors.
It’s depressing how competence seems to be in very short supply, especially at the decision making level in this country. I also can’t help but think we’re building the wrong homes.
Ideally, as the population ages, we should be encouraging older people to sell their 3-4 bedroom home and perhaps move to more suitable accommodation like bungalows for example. However, would people in this position make that move, even if it were available? Doubtful.
I think there’s an age after which older people become very reluctant to take large decisions like moving. My mother (now in her eighties) and several of her friends still like in their family homes and have passed the point where they will ever move, unless it’s to a care home or hospital.
I don’t see bungalows as a silver bullet. These use just as much land as family homes these days (sometimes more) and it’s land which is the limiting factor on housing supply (due to excessive planning restrictions).
But yes, the allocating of housing to people is often wildly mismatched in the UK. A substantial minority people with much more housing (rooms, area, sometimes multiple properties) than they really need and a larger group with less. But I still wouldn’t want government interfering to reallocate housing – that would only make things worse.
High property taxes could theoretically help with the allocation problem. But no one except for economists seem to like the idea of having to pay the state for the privilege of owning your own property. For some reason, people seem much happier to pay for the privilege of making one’s own money (i.e. income taxation). I guess part of the reason is that no Western government would be likely to lower income taxes in tandem with increasing the property taxes; they’d just increase the overall tax burden and keep bloating the public sector.
Yes, Ali. Introduce CGT on final sale of a house with interim Roll Over of the gain into a replacement house, and no double taxation with IHT in addition. Other countries do this. This and other measures would stop the obsession with rising house prices which harms our children who cannot afford to buy a modest house. Of course Income Taxes should be reduced if capital tax raises sufficient money.
An piece that needs photos surely?
Perhaps researching who actually did boost this might have been worthwhile?
Step forward that intellectual giant John Prescott. This was the main thrust of his 50K house ambition. And as most Housing Association executives are Labour supporters, they went and go along with it.
It is only public money after all, and there is plenty more where that came from.
The UK birth rate is below replacement. The divorce rate is down and the marriage rate is up. The majority of homes in Britain are owned outright and will form the basis of an avalanche of inherited property within a decade. Surely we only need to replace dilapidated properties, not increase the housing stock. Where is the demand coming from that we need a new generation of pre-fabs?
*I’m joking of course! We all know where the demand is coming from*
Where? Do not be coy
Romania, Ghana, Bangladesh, Syria, Vietnam, Mali, Serbia, Albania, Morocco, South Africa, Indonesia, Kiribati, Georgia, Chad, etc etc
A reasonable point Matt; but most existing houses are too expensive, while minimal low cost and ‘social’ housing is built: the builder can make more profit from larger houses and understandably wants to build these. We have no vision of ‘New Towns’ and town planning as did our forebears after WW2.
There is also a structural geographic imbalance. There is demand for more houses south of The Trent, while in Lancashire there are street rows of dilapidated houses lying empty.
On the ‘inheritance point’ you rightly make, it seems a lottery whether you have parents who own a house or not; and whether you are their sole child or have multiple siblings.
But my point is that if you had zero immigration (I exaggerate to make the point) the difference between births and deaths mean that you would only need 27,000 new homes a year to meet demand. You don’t need New Towns if you keep the immigration numbers to below 100k net per year.
On social housing, if you limited immigration to a sensible number, you could use the existing council houses and housing association properties for the purpose for which they were intended – to house young, working-class families local to the area on subsidised rents giving them the same security that their richer countrymen enjoy.
In terms of regional imbalance, surely remote working gives us the opportunity to spread out around this country and not need to live within commuting distance of London.
On inheritance, yes it is a lottery but I do think it is an underappreciated phenomenon. Many of those journalists you hear moaning about the sky-high rents in London will in time inherited five bedroom piles in the home counties. Let’s see whether their views on Inheritance Taxes change when that happy day arrives.
There is a large difference between (1) the concept of pre-fab and (2) its execution. My wife’s parents lived in a pre-fab built in 1950; and one of her children lives in it today. Post-War methods were way behind today’s but the house remains sturdy and attractive.
That today houses are built on bad foundations or flood plain; and are a block of housing with no public spaces and community, is a result of builders doing it for profit (as they should do) with poor public planning and inefficient systems to obtain planning permission.
It seems modern pre-fabs are manufactured solely for profit, with Government and Local Authority uninterested. With modern engineering and a good designer, pre-fab houses could be made attractive, while bulk purchase sponsored by government could reduce the price. The cited examples from Germany & Sweden show it is possible. Then, for all houses whether built on site or pre-fab, the standard of construction, the location and the attractiveness of the locality could be greatly improved.
They’re going to wind up as crap weather favelas aren’t they…
All these bullshit grants and sustainability targets. Let the market decide free of government intervention. The government should aim to level the playing field by allowing developers to experiment ( free up the planning system and allow all safe builds) and allow customers to choose