The boss of the country’s biggest housebuilder has warned that offsite construction in housing risks producing rows and rows of identikit homes.

Barratt chief executive David Thomas (pictured, centre) said that one of the reasons it shut down its offsite factory operation, called Advance Housing, back in 2007 after just five years was that planners were looking for more variation in design than the eight design options it had on offer.

He added: “That’s one of the challenges when you look at developing a full offsite solution and when you look at what’s considered to be good design principles. Having very uniform streets of housing is not what the planners are looking for.

“What a factory wants is for things to be very uniform. Apartments are much more easily adapted to being offsite. Uniform is very, very good for offsite. Apartments, typically, are very uniform.”

“Having very uniform streets of housing is not what the planners are looking for”

David Thomas

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