A project has been launched to develop an industrialised offsite solution to deliver high quality homes faster and more reliably.
The £6.5m Advanced Industrialised Methods for the Construction of Homes (AIMCH) project has been awarded funding under the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, which is administered by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation.
The R&D 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 Trading Ltd, the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC), the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre (CSIC) and Forster Roofing Services Ltd as the SME partner. The project will be managed by Limberger Associates.
The three-year AIMCH project aims to tackle the many challenges facing the sector including the skills shortages, an ageing workforce and poor productivity. It aims to identify and developing industrialised offsite solutions to meet current and future housebuilding demands. These will be trialled on live housing projects, with successful new methods then being commercialised and brought to market in volume.
Stewart Dalgarno (pictured), 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.”
Mike Pitts from Innovate UK said: “We are excited about the possibilities of this project, which we hope will be a game-changer for the housing sector. The partners are experienced innovators and offer scale to showcase a world-leading solution. It has the potential to deliver wider sector benefits in terms of jobs, investment and growth.”
The project has potential to impact on 35,000 homes being delivered by AIMCH partners across the UK each year.
