Designs on Innovation

Partnering. Prefabrication. Timber Frame. Steel Frame. Quality Circles. The mantra of innovation and change reverberates through the social housing sector as Egan disciples through to wary and hard-bitten development officers grapple with the challenge of finding new and better ways of procuring higher quality housing, faster, cheaper, and to agreed deadlines.

These themes were at the heart of a recent Department of Trade and Industry-sponsored visit to Canada to study their housing practices with a view to informing current and future housing production in the UK. The team included members from industry, social housing and the academic and consultancy sectors who were particularly interested in finding ways to carry forward the Rethinking Construction agenda.

A series of meetings and factory visits were undertaken in order to explore these issues, including meetings with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, (- yes, they have a Housing Corporation too), the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology, and 19 companies active in or supplying to the housebuilding industry, both domestically and for export.

The CMHC is the principal body within Canadian government charged with responsibility for developing and supporting the housing sector. In the rented sector CMHC subsidises the 660,000 social housing homes provided by provincial and municipal housing agencies and local non-profit organisations. Over one third of all mortgages in Canada are insured by CMHC, and their support for any particular technological innovation improves mortgageability.

In the UK housebuilding is often characterised as traditional, site based and masonry dominated, partly as a function of perceived consumer conservatism but particularly influenced by conservative attitudes among mortgage institutions, a reluctance to invest in innovation, and risk aversion within the construction sector itself. The Rethinking Construction report identified the weakness of this situation and advocated new approaches to both production and procurement to secure better quality, lower cost, safer and more timely production.

In stark contrast, our Canadian counterparts work within a market where systems-based approaches have flourished, giving rise to a healthy diversity of high quality and factory based production. The dual role of industry support and mortgage insurer adopted by the CMHC has facilitated an openness to new designs and technologies. The mortgage insurer role of CMHC effectively requires it to work with certification agencies such as the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology to set appropriate standards, and this integration between funding and technology has created more open attitudes to innovation.

There are a number of different sectors within the Canadian housebuilding industry that we can learn from including timber, steel and concrete framing. The timber frame sector is the most highly developed and comprises a large percentage of the Canadian housebuilding industry, incorporating both panellised and more basic "stick-built" methods.

Panellised systems involve the off-site production of panels (large or small) comprising framing to pre-determined designs, and can include both sheathing and insulation. The advantages of panellised systems include higher quality and more reliable construction and speedier completion of a watertight shell.

In this country timber frame is already well established in the speculative housebuilding sector with a number of the major national developers completing up to 25 per cent of their programmes in this way. Major national developers such as Beazer Partnerships have invested considerable sums in the development of new plant and equipment and the research and development of more energy efficient homes to meet the higher standards of the new Part L of the Building Regulations.

In Canada factory produced timber frame comprises a significantly greater proportion of the market. A good example is Viceroy Homes of Toronto. Viceroy is a leading manufacturer of pre-engineered house packages for builders, providing services from design and engineering through to the manufacture of panellised frames and all related pre-cut timber. The company has a catalogue of over 100 designs but also builds to customers own design and specification. Viceroy is a large manufacturer employing over 300 personnel and housed in over 230,000 ft² of manufacturing facilities in Toronto alone.

In some respects Viceroy's plant is a vision of the way things could and should be in the production of housing. It is spacious, clean, vertically integrated and well capitalised, utilising highly efficient, computer controlled equipment including multi-function saws for panel components, and routers for stair construction. The integration of both timber for framing and uPVC for windows and other external components ensures a more efficient single source for design and delivery, and better component integration.

A newly emerging type of panellised timber system is Structural Insulated Panels, or SIPs. These comprise high performance panels constructed of two skins of oriented strand board sandwiching a foam plastic (usually polystyrene) core to form a rigid monolithic structure. Such systems are strong and require much less framing than conventional panel systems. The solid core of insulation is thermally efficient and generally more consistent than insulation quilts. There are clearly benefits in such a simple but effective system. The claimed thermal performance advantages over standard insulated panels need independent verification and certification but if proven there could be a sizeable market in the social housing sector.

In addition to timber framed housing we saw a range of very impressive steel framed and concrete housing systems. These are to be detailed more fully in the report of the study visit to be published at a conference in October.

Overall there are a number of important lessons to be learned from the Canadian housebuilding industry.

Firstly, prefabrication can lead to higher quality and speedier construction, although good management of the flow of components, and good construction management on site is essential. Following on from this higher standards of insulation are essential, but so are higher standards of air-tightness. We build extraordinarily leaky houses resulting in very significant energy losses. Revisions to Part L of the Building Regulations will effectively require us to address this deficiency.

Secondly, the role of the CMHC in promoting research across a wide range of housing and construction fields has no real parallel in UK. The Canadian integration of research has facilitated a more open attitude to innovation, and CMHCÕs role in insuring mortgages has improved acceptability of innovative products. Thirdly, the partnership between industry and government in Canada has resulted in a more progressive industry, prepared to invest and to take risks. New products are brought, in commercial confidence, to accreditation agencies earlier in the development programme and that leads to more effective research and development and innovation.

Finally, sustainability is more part of Canadian thinking than it is ours, although I suspect they still have a long way to go to make construction really Green at heart. In summary, providing we address the fundamentals of attitudes to innovation and risk and an openness to learning, there is much we can learn from the Canadian experience.