Briefing: Future trends in UK housebuilding

Abstract

Homes have more influence on the way that people live and behave in society than anything else they spend their money on. A house usually represents an individual's largest ever single investment, and is expected to last for decades, if not indefinitely. In order to make the most appropriate investment today, however, people need to know how they will be living and working in the future, both individually and as a society. A Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) report The Future of UK Housebuilding, published in December 2010, investigates and debates this issue. This briefing discusses the implications of the report for municipal engineers and others. In particular, the issues of sustainability, zero carbon dioxide, offsite technologies, technology changes and community impact are discussed. Homes for people: the futureFuture housing requirements are qualitative and reflect changing aspirations, values and tastes. A critical uncertainty of the future is whether the UK's population -possibly in the future comprising a more diverse mix of cultures and backgrounds -will continue to follow this same pattern of attitude to housing, or whether society's attitudes will change, leading buyers, occupiers and hence suppliers to make different choices. Future patterns of development will be driven by demographic, economic, socio-cultural, political, technological and environmental factors. According to the CLG Live Table 401, the number of households in the UK has been projected to gradually increase, from the current 27 million to 33 million by 2031 (CLG, 2010). The population is projected to continue rising and the average household size is decreasing. The Live Table 402 shows that one-person households accounted for 19% of overall households in 1971, but that share increased to 33% by 2010 (CLG, 2010). The vast majority of future housing stock in the next few decades is already in place now. The form and make-up of individual households will continue to change, modes of living, working and leisure time will continue to interweave, and consequently future housing will need to be more flexible and adaptable than it is today. Houses currently account for 82% of dwelling stock in England, while the split between houses and flats in new-build in recent years has presented a trend towards equilibrium, reaching 50/50 in 2008/2009 as indicated in the Live Table 254 ( CLG, 2010). Construction techniques and regulations (both local planning and national building regulations) will need to acknowledge and enable this increasing flexibility, while the suitability (and adaptability) of the existing housing stock will become an increasingly important factor.Many of these issues are discussed in a report recently published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) (Goodier and Pan, 2010). This report discusses a number of UK housebuilding scenarios for the next 10-20 years, in order to provoke deliberation and encourage more strategic thinking within the industry and among policy makers and other stakeholders....

Building information modelling and its effect on off-site construction in UK civil engineering

“…Despite the downturn in the current financial situation in the UK, off-site construction is employed in many large-scale building projects varying from hotels and hospitals to prisons and student accommodation. Certain aspects, such as precast concrete elements, have also been widely employed in the civil engineering sector, but other applications have had little deployment (Gibb, 2001;Goodier and Pan, 2010) and this view was supported by the interviewees in this current survey. Some claimed that the civil engineering sector 'thinks less of their process and data possibly due to the size and duration of the projects' while others debated the reasons for differences.…”

Towards systemic domestic retrofit: a social practices approach

“…1). This is due to the evolution in the building industry from local homebuilders of the 1930s to regional diversification of the 1960s to national homebuilders in the last decades of the twentieth century (Goodier and Pan, 2010) as well as changes in technologies and materials used for domestic buildings (e.g., cavity walls, windows, insulation, central heating, and fuel sources). The median dwelling in the UK was built between 1939 and 1959, making the British housing stock amongst the oldest in Europe (Lowe, 2007).…”

Future use of life-cycle assessment in civil engineering

“…The industry is often perceived as lagging behind in adopting novel technologies, materials, practices and processes (Egan, 1998;Foresight, 2008;Goodier and Pan, 2010), yet designers are prevented from taking advantage of novel solutions (e.g. those with lower environmental impacts) because when these are developed, their journey into the marketplace and into specifications is slow and often tortuous.…”

“…An understanding and appreciation of the future should arguably be a fundamental requirement in this sector because the civil engineering supply chain designs, builds and increasingly manages and operates civil infrastructure and structures that will be used over many decades, with the design life of major infrastructure often being 100 or even 150 years. The civil engineering community needs to expand its planning horizons to prepare for potential future events, trends and operating environments (Foresight, 2008;Goodier and Pan, 2010;Harty et al, 2007), yet construction companies appear reluctant to engage in planning beyond a few years, or past the next project, and there is little evidence of a formal process in the formulation of long-term strategies. (Basic strategic planning is conducted, but the process relies on SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) or PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal)/Steep type analyses (Betts and Ofori, 1992;Brightman et al, 1999;Price, 2003) and focuses more on company business or market strategy rather than structure or infrastructure.)…”