Thames Estuary Weston Homes Projects

A major housing association is exploring establishing a modular housing venture with a local authority – which will discussed in detail at our Offsite Manufacture Conference in June.

Geoff Pearce, Executive Director for Regeneration and Development at Swan Housing Group, told our Thames Estuary Development Conference that the Essex-based association is in discussions with an authority about an offsite homes factory partnership: “We’re talking to a local authority about opening a jointly owned modular housing factory that would be a commercial enterprise and producing homes for us.”
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He also rebutted concerns that the cost of modular housing will be unsustainable if there is a housing market downturn: “What is different today is that the housing market is becoming a much more mixed economy. There is a burning platform because we are seeing a real decline of people in the construction industry with skills. If we can get to a point where the mainstream of housing provision is produced offsite and we top that up with on-site traditional development we can become a very sustainable industry.”

He added: “To get the scale of development we want across the south east we are going to need that mixed economy. The Government has to encourage ways for the industry to deliver. We haven’t got workforce to deliver 200,000 homes per annum.”

He said a heightened focus on quality, with homes having to be designed to ever higher standards of air tightness, cannot be achieved using traditional skills. Swan operates a 80,000 sq ft factory to manufacture homes using cross laminated timber beams for its own developments.

Swan Housing will be speaking at our Offsite Manufacture Conference & Exhibition on the 13th June – joined by local authorities, universities, modular providers and more. Register here > 

Pearce also said that Swan has been awarded preferred bidder status by Southend-on-Sea Borough Council to regenerate the Queensway estate. The project, a joint-venture between Southend Council and Swan, will deliver up to 1,600 new homes, of which over 500 will be affordable, as well as a new centre for the town.

Residents could be won over if developers demonstrate the benefits such regeneration projects can deliver, he said: “What convinced local people was the need to change what was already there if they see what is on their door step isn’t great.”

In terms of procurement Pearce said that Swan’s existing construction framework is just about to expire, and the association will be moving to a “more flexible” dynamic purchasing system.

Stephen Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer of the Thames Enterprise Park, said vertical farming is one of the uses it is considering for their major new employment zone.

The park, which is proposed on the site of a former oil refinery near Tilbury, is also hoping to create the UK’s first food logistics hub with space for 180,000 pallets. By using a similar approach to that taken by Amazon at its nearby Tilbury site, the park will aim to make much more intensive use of the site than conventional logistics facilities.

The clean up of the first 70 acres of the former refinery had already begun and is due to be completed later this year.

An outline planning consent has gone in for the whole scheme with a detailed application for phase one due to be submitted within the next two months so that ground can be broken in the first quarter of 2020. Financial support, either through tax breaks or grants, will be required in order to cover the “enormous” capital expensive involved in the heavy level of automation that the proposals will require.

Dawn Wylie, Land Director at Weston Homes, told delegates that the housebuilder plans to be onsite at the end of the summer with its project at the former Abbey retail park, which occupies 2.1ha of derelict brownfield land on the edge of Barking town centre.

The scheme will connect Barking train station with the river via the grounds of the town’s ruined medieval abbey. It will deliver a total of 1,091 homes, 35% of which will be affordable in line with the Greater London Authority’s policy requirements. The scheme is set to be considered by Barking and Dagenham’s planning committee in June and work could start before the end of the summer.

However, smaller housebuilders like Weston cannot offer as much in terms of planning benefits as their larger counterparts, she said: “One of the things we can do is speed up planning because holding costs for small companies are incredibly high, if we can find a way to get smaller sites through planning quicker it would genuinely help them to get under way.”

Weston is also integrating modern methods of construction into its schemes by ensuring that the bathrooms in its homes are manufactured offsite and then fitted on site.
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