The UK is entering a new era of house building  with the roll out of fully-fitted three-bedroom homes from the Ilke Homes factory in Yorkshire. Eight houses fitted with kitchens and bathrooms will roll off the production line every day in Knaresborough, to be loaded on to lorries for delivery across the country. Experts have hailed it a revolution in British house building that would slash the 40 weeks it could take to build a traditional home to just 10 days.

The factory cost of a two or three-bedroom home would be from £65,000 to £79,000, although that excludes the cost of land,on-site assembly and connecting the home to services, which could double or triple the final price. The factory plans to produce 2,000 houses a year,rising eventually to 5,000, which would catapult it into the top echelon of volume house builders in the country.

Meanwhile, the insurance company Legal &General has built a vast factory outside Leeds which it said would build 3,500 homes a year, with the first two and three-bedroom homes being delivered in the past few weeks. It said it intended to build similar factories in locations across the UK, which would turn L&G into a bigger builder than Persimmon or Barratt Developments.

The term prefab has been shunned by the new house builders in favour of “modular construction”. Developers have been promising homes built to higher standards than those using traditional methods with energy bills would be half that of a conventional home due to better insulation.

The housing secretary, James Brokenshire, speaking at the opening of the Knaresborough site, said the factory would help the government reach an annual target of 300,000 new homes in England. Last year nearly 220,000 homes were built in England. “This is about challenging the ways we have done things in the past. We want to see 300,000 homes being delivered by the mid-2020s, so we need to scale up and build more, better and faster."

About 85% of the 250 workers hired for the Ilke factory so far have come from outside the building industry. Most of the materials used come from within Britain, with the galvanised steel frame from Scarborough and the kitchens made in Rotherham.

Initially, the two Yorkshire factories would add just 2-3% to Britain’s housing output, but this was likely to grow as the industry develops.

Toogood, who joined L&G from Rolls Royce, said the company aimed to completely disrupt the existing model for building homes.

“We are building a new industry here, designing indifferent ways and redefining the house building process. We are changing the supply line, and building at a pace never seen before.”

Bjorn Conway, the chief executive of private equity-backed Ilke, said: “We are just scratching the surface of what’s possible. We took a licence on this factory just 12 months ago and have already delivered the first homes. We are deconstructing construction, and driving productivity improvements, without relying on hard-to-find construction skills.”

Article & Image Source: The Guardian

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