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New 18 association offsite alliance launched for the North of England
A group of housing associations in the North have formed an alliance with the ambition of delivering 9,000 offsite homes per year.
The newly launched Offsite Homes Alliance (OSHA) currently consists of 18 registered providers (RPs), including Gentoo, The Guinness Partnership and Riverside, which have agreed to work together with offsite suppliers to increase the delivery of factory-built homes.
The other partners are: Bolton at Home, Great Places, Irwell Valley, Jigsaw, Mosscare St Vincent’s, One Manchester, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, Stockport Homes, Thirteen, Together, Trafford Housing Trust, Wythenshawe Community Housing and Your Housing Group.
Mike Ormesher, project director of OSHA, told Inside Housing: “The first objective of the alliance is to understand the robust systems out there, to stress-test them on sites and to aggregate the demand across all of the registered providers involved, so that suppliers aren’t looking to come in and do five houses or three houses because pilot projects are a nightmare for manufacturers to manage within their environment.”
He continued: “For the majority of RPs, the value they’re going to get is about intelligence, control, low risk and contribution to cutting out waste in the DfMA [design for manufacture and assembly] process... for some of the partners the ambition is to enter into a JV [joint venture] to be able to manufacture designs for the RP market in the longer term.”
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Mr Ormesher, who was previously a director at the modular firm Top Hat, said the overall ambition is to deliver 9,000 homes per year through the alliance, a target which he thinks could be achieved between 2022 and 2023 based on the current number of landlords involved in the programme.
While the alliance is currently based in the North, Mr Ormesher said he believes it could go national.
Currently, the alliance is focused on completing a business case and setting up the legal and operational governance, he explained.
He added that the alliance is likely to be procuring homes by the middle of this year, with the potential to set up a JV in 12 to 18 months’ time.
The alliance currently has 75 supply chain partners registered on its purchasing system, and is also currently evaluating 36 different offsite technologies.
A recent report by the government’s modern methods of construction (MMC) champion Mark Farmer argued that the government should set a target of delivering 75,000 modular homes per year.
The report said the government should use incentives, such as grant funding, to encourage the use of modular development.
Starting this year, all housing associations that enter into a strategic partnership with Homes England must deliver 25% of grant-funded homes using MMC.
A similar alliance of housing associations, named Building Better, was set up by the National Housing Federation in 2018.
The group is currently in the process of searching for contractors to join a £600m MMC framework.
Update: at 5.08pm, 14.01.21 This story was updated as the original version incorrectly stated that One Housing was part of the alliance instead of One Manchester
