Government to provide invcentives to boost off-site construction

Ministers are preparing a raft of incentives to deliver more than 100,000 modular homes to help tackle the housing crisis.

A white paper due out next month will include measures to encourage banks to lend to firms which construct homes off-site before delivering them to their final destination, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

Ministers hope modular construction can make a big contribution towards hitting its target of building one million new homes by 2020.

The industry has been investing heavily in modular construction in recent years, with investor Legal & General and contractor Laing O’Rourke among the early major players.

Housing and planning minister Gavin Barwell said: “Offsite construction could provide a huge opportunity to increase housing supply and we want to see more innovation like this emulated across the housebuilding sector.

“The £3bm Home Ðǿմ«Ã½ Fund will help build more than 225,000 new homes and provide loans for small firms, custom builders, offsite construction and essential infrastructure, creating thousands of new jobs in the process.â€

Earlier this month both Barwell and Ed Lister, chair of the Homes and Communities Agency, said they were exploring ways of encouraging a wider range of firms to build homes, with Lister saying he wanted companies to come forward even if they had no prior housebuilding experience.

Ðǿմ«Ã½ also revealed the first prototypes from investor Legal & General’s mammoth modular housing factory in Yorkshire will roll off the production line by the end of the year.