Simon Bayliss shares his viewpoint from our Housing Londoners report, exploring standard housing typologies designed to the highest quality and delivered in half the time.

In the 30 years from 1960 to 1989 almost 9m homes were built across the UK, with 40 per cent delivered by the public sector. The following 30 years to 2019 managed just 5.5m, with the Local Authority share falling by a massive 97.5 per cent. 

Although today’s ‘cost of living crisis’ is presented as a temporary condition caused by global events, the reason the UK is suffering particularly badly is due to its acute inequality in wealth and income distribution, caused by this chronic under-delivery of housing.  

The problem is perhaps most dramatic in London as population growth of 33 per cent between 1990 and 2020 added 2.2m people but only around 500,000 new homes have been completed. The answer to this crisis, necessary for the health of the London economy and Londoners themselves is, of course, to build many more homes. There are many obstacles to meeting this challenge: urgent planning reform, more resources in local planning, the greenbelt debate, clarity on housing regulation, consistent application of standards, and a huge increase in government funding for social housing. 

In the meantime perhaps the most progress in housing delivery is being offered by the Build to Rent (BTR) sector which relies on institutional funding to deliver purpose-designed homes in professionally managed and maintained buildings and places. 

A key benefit of this sector is scale. Whilst the traditional buy-to-let landlord is an amateur investor with 1 or 2 homes, most BTR operators aim for at least 200 homes in any single building, with the capacity and ambition to deliver considerably more. With this goes the incentive to deliver quickly, as homes need to be finished to be rented and the investment repaid. Finally, attracting new residents both on day one and in years to come, as well ensuring buildings remain safe and efficient to manage over many years, puts design and construction quality at the centre of the decision making process. These ambitions, and an increased focus on standardisation of design for the homes, amenities and construction, naturally align with the benefits of factory-made solutions, and volumetric modular in particular. 

One such scheme is Greystar’s Greenford Quay development on the 8.6hectare GlaxoSmithKline factory site. HTA’s masterplan, developed with Hawkins\Brown, Mae and SLCE Architects gained consent for around 2000 homes within a single detailed planning application in 2016. Seeing the real benefits of prefabrication Greystar have been working with Tide Construction and their volumetric manufacturer Vision Modular Systems, to complete two buildings with 630 homes, now fully let, in just 4 years. Faster delivery reduces local disruption and a recent study by Cambridge/Napier Universities shows that the modular system reduced embodied carbon by more than 40 per cent. More buildings are in progress with almost 1500 homes will have been completed by 2025, in less than 10 years from acquiring the site.   

This hints at the huge potential for similar such partnerships with London’s 32 Boroughs, with standard housing typologies designed to the highest quality and delivered in half the time, using far less energy both in construction and in use. In time, perhaps we can move on from perpetual crisis and focus our attentions more positively on the creating great places to live.