Government paper on Modern Methods of Construction

POST – the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology – is an office of both Houses of Parliament, charged with providing independent and balanced analysis of public policy issues that have a basis in science and technology.

The briefing note you can download from our site, Postnote No.209, published in December 2003, was prepared by Heather Lovell, and funded through her Fellowship at POST by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It provides brief introduction to the topic of modern methods of construction (MMC) and deals specifically with modern methods of house building.

The note takes off from the 2003 Barker Review, initiated by the government of the day. Barker argued that the UK housing shortage is having widespread economic and social consequences. Government estimates suggested that by 2016 there would be 3 million new households in the UK. The Sustainable Communities Plan outlined a major new house building programme to help meet this growth which emphasised MMC. According to the then government, MMC could achieve “a step change in the construction industry to produce the quantity and quality of housing we need”. It set a target of a quarter of new publicly funded social housing to be built using MMC in the years following 2004.

Download the briefing note here