Urban Splash: MMC needs long-term vision

COMMENT: Urban Splash’s £90m partnership with Japanese developer Sekisui House and Homes England has been more than two years in the making, says Simon Gawthorpe. During this period, I have been to Japan twice and visited two of Sekisui’s factories. The whole set-up is incredible. On my second visit we went to the 70,000 sq ft research and development institute in Osaka and sat in a two-storey house on an earthquake simulator. Four of us clung to the table as a man pressed a button and turned it up to 7.7 on the Richter scale. Sekisui House uses this as a sales tool to show its customers the strength of its buildings. From an innovation and technology standpoint, there are so many awesome things like that: energy and power, with advanced solar panels, it has a zero carbon drive and has delivered 44,000 zero-carbon homes. Sekisui has delivered more than 2.4m homes since its launch in 1960. Today it delivers around 40,000 homes a year, 15,000 of which are customisable. That scalability means now we can take a long-term view. Urban Splash started developing homes using modular techniques in 2012, working with Liverpool-based architect Shedkm and off-site construction partner SIG (formerly Insulshell) to create a prototype modular home for the family housing market. Initially we were looking at traditional construction, then we turned to modern methods of construction. We tend to operate in the city centre fringe and so very quickly came to the Victorian terraced house typology. Could we do a modern take on a Victorian terrace for our existing sites? We began work to deliver a panelised model (which comes in pieces and is erected on site) then, working with SIG, we switched to fully volumetric (each storey is built off-site and dropped in). In 2016, after years of R&D and design iterations, we brought the first 43 homes to market at New Islington in Manchester. We offered two options: a two-storey 1,000 sq ft model or three-storey 1,500 sq ft model, with layouts determined by each customer. In the early days there were a variety of challenges: from creating an attainable yet sustainable product, to helping our first customers secure mortgages on an untried product. The release of Mark Farmer’s Modernise or Die report in 2016 was a big moment. He called for radical changes in an industry facing a severe skills shortage. And Berkeley, L&G and Swan Housing have been influential in driving forward innovation. Vertical integration was the big recommendation, many believed that ownership of the supply chain would enable more effective operations and control quality. We acquired SIG in 2018 with our 85-employee factory in Alfreton, which fuelled the launch of our fourth modular scheme at Port Loop in Birmingham. The investment from Sekisui will also see the company integrate its expertise into our business. But the private sector cannot do it alone. The government, through Homes England, has realised that it needs to be a catalyst, it does need public sector coercion and support, otherwise it will be vulnerable to market fluctuations and any type of downtown. It needs long-term vision. Sekisui was genuinely surprised that the UK industry was so outdated and we could have a housing crisis. In Japan, the output of homes is so enormous and the technology is so advanced – it can sense when a person is home, run a bath for a child and withstand an earthquake, all at scale. Urban Splash has a target to grow from around 100 modular homes a year to 2,000 in a six-year period. We’re conscious that there is an overload of exciting new options and the challenge will be to be selective, work out what the UK market needs and then gradually build it up. Simon Gawthorpe is managing director for modular  at Urban Splash