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Legal & General has hired Rosie Toogood to head up its new modular housing business. 

Toogood will join the company in mid-June as chief executive and moves from car manufacturer Rolls-Royce, where she held senior roles across the company and is currently business development director for its civil aerospace business.

The new appointment forms part of L&G’s plans to build 3,000 homes a year and a pipeline of 70,000 homes over the next decade from its new factory in Leeds.

The £55m facility is expected to be the largest modular  factory in Europe and was first announced in February 2016. It has already had a number of false starts, with units originally planned to be rolling off the production line at the beginning of the year.

Prior to joining Rolls-Royce, Toogood trained with Ernst & Young as a chartered accountant and holds an MBA in Strategy & Procurement. She also served for eight years as a non-executive board member of Derwent Housing Association.

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Cleckheaton-based Elite Systems has secured a spot on an £225m education framework.

Fusion21’s Education Modular Buildings Framework is worth up to £225m over a four-year period, and now off-site specialist Elite has been appointed to it.

The company, which focuses on bespoke modular buildings, is one of nine companies on the framework.

“We have a proven track record of manufacturing and installing educational buildings in a narrow timeframe, and are able to work around sites with limited access to make the best use of the space available. Our collaborative, tailored approach puts us in a good position to deliver successful projects under the framework.”

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Buildoffsite Appoints an Interim Director

Tim Hall has been appointed as the Interim Director of Buildoffsite following the sudden death of the chairman, Andrew Dix, in March this year.

Buildoffsite is a UK based business organisation that promotes:

• increased use of offsite methods across all sectors of the UK construction market
• innovation in the development of offsite solutions
• more effective promotion of business and project benefits by offsite solution suppliers
• improved understanding by clients and suppliers of the benefits of offsite solutions
• education and skills development in the use of offsite solutions
• debate, discussion and knowledge transfer relating to the use of offsite solutions

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Modular housing factory planned for east London

The Silvertown Partnership (TSP), a £3.5bn scheme run by developer First Base, aims to create homes and commercial property in east London. It has partnered with engineering giant Aecom, which will provide the technology required for modular homes in the Docklands.

Aecom is seeking planning permission to construct a modular factory which, it is hoped, will deliver 500 homes a year. The first homes are expected to be provided next year.

Phil Wade, a director at TSP, said: “We are excited to be partnering with Aecom to deliver 3,000 homes for Londoners via cutting-edge construction methods. As the government stated in its recent Housing White Paper, innovation is essential to meet housing demand in the UK, and this is a bold step that will help us deliver these much-needed new homes in significantly less time.

Of the 3,000 homes being provided from the factory, 35% will be affordable. Aecom will be responsible for designing and assembling the homes on site.

Modular housing construction has begun to take hold in the UK, with a number of new entrants to the market in the past 18 months including Legal and General with a factory near Leeds with the capacity for 3,000 homes per year. Your Housing Group which signed a £2.75Bn deal with a Chinese consortium to develop a number of factories across the country and Swan Housing Association which is planning an offsite factory, which should deliver its first homes this summer.