A £6.5 million project designed to tackle the UK housing “crisis” by using offsite solutions to deliver homes faster and more reliably has been awarded funding under the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
The fund is administered by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation. The project, known as Advanced Industrialised Methods for the Construction of Homes (AIMCH), is a collaboration between Stewart Milne Group, Barratt Developments PLC, London & Quadrant Housing Trust Ltd, Tarmac, the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC), the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre (CSIC) and Forster Roofing Services as the SME partner. The project will be managed by Limberger Associates.
The three-year initiative aims to identify and develop industrialised offsite solutions to meet current and future housebuilding demands. These will be trialled on live housing projects.
AIMCH has been tipped to result in new digital design tools, manufacturing advancements, improved near-to-market offsite systems and lean site processes.
Stewart Dalgarno, AIMCH project director and director of product development at Stewart Milne Group said, “We need tens of thousands of new homes across the UK every year, but it’s also vital that these new homes are of a higher quality, leading to increased customer satisfaction and improved building performance. Digital working and industrialised offsite construction can be part of the solution, but they have not yet broken through as viable mainstream alternatives to traditional methods of building homes.
“AIMCH’s ambition is to use industrialisation to transform how we build our homes in the UK, leading to more homes that can be built quickly and viably. We believe it will be the catalyst the housing sector needs to move towards advanced digital integrated manufacturing, whilst overcoming the challenges that stand between the sector today and where it needs to go in the future.”
