Modernise or die – the uncompromising title of the Farmer review. The ASBP has long been promoting the massive resource and carbon reduction wins associated with a more off-site and pre-manufactured approach to construction. Put succinctly – construction as assembly and disassembly rather than building and demolition. But have we been missing a trick? The conclusions from the hard hitting Farmer Review are that skills shortages demand that house building moves rapidly to pre manufactured approaches. The report even recommends fiscal levers to drive this shift, to create the kind of radical change envisioned in past industry reviews by Egan and Latham.
One particularly eye-catching recommendation could have come directly from our Innovate UK RE-FAB research project – ”look to establish an industry wide design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) protocol that enables a common platform to be created and supports possible interchangeability of components.”
To read the report in full, click here.