Barriers and opportunities for offsite in the UK

The UK still falls behind most equivalent economies in terms of the takeup of industrialisation in construction and techniques such as offsite construction. Interest in the UK in industrialisation and offsite has recently been increasing however, partly attributable to the increased demand for housing, and pressure by Government and industry to improve the performance of the UK construction industry, particularly its efficiency, quality, value and safety. This paper discusses the views of the UK construction industry on offsite. This work has been conducted by Loughborough University as part of a DTI and UK industry funded research programme on offsite technologies and prefabrication called prOSPa (promoting OffSite Production applications). This paper presents results from a recently completed questionnaire survey on offsite and prefabrication in the UK. A preliminary survey was used to guide and inform the development of a main survey involving three different questionnaires in order to target the three main groups of stakeholders involved with offsite suppliers/manufacturers, contractors and designers/clients. More than 90% of the respondents had used some type of offsite or prefabrication in at least one of their projects. Demand for offsite is clearly increasing in the UK and nearly three quarters of the suppliers surveyed thought that take-up of offsite by industry was increasing in their sector. The biggest advantages of offsite compared with traditional construction were thought to be the decreased construction time on site and increased quality. The belief that using offsite is more expensive is clearly the main barrier to its increased use.