Our strategy is designed to sustain the West Midlands leadership position in manufacturing and some forms of construction technologies. Our strategic response has been to set an ambitious long term performance standard for new homes, aligned to a series of realistic but challenging interim milestones. These standards are all aligned to industry benchmarks and, critically, are outcome targets which specify the performance that we require, not the technologies or solutions that might be used to achieve them. This will allow us to incentivise innovation and participation across the whole supply chain including SMEs.
Brownfield Land - The West Midlands already has a national leadership position in brownfield remediation through its National Brownfield Institute and multi-million-pound brownfield regeneration programme, and our strategy is intended to augment this position in the areas of advanced manufacturing in construction and net zero housebuilding.
Plan for Growth - The region's medium term growth strategy, the Plan for Growth, identifies the manufacture of future housing as one of eight key growth cluster opportunities for the region, with the potential to add 3,700 new, high value jobs to the West Midlands' economy.
This flexibility means that the strategy can support more inclusive and diverse supply chain growth – for developers, investors, and suppliers – and will be open to any supplier or innovator who can robustly achieve the technical standard, from major businesses to start ups and SMEs.
The strategy has also been designed to ensure that we do not force the industry to move solely towards ‘modular’ or volumetric housing. The recent, well publicised challenges of some suppliers and housebuilders show clearly that the likely maturity profile of the UK’s AMC/MMC market will require a diverse range of solutions spanning all seven of the Government’s defined categories of MMC covering panelisation, sub-assembly use, innovative materials, and on-site technologies.
The outcome specification set out in our strategy will enable more hybrid approaches to AMC/MMC to be brought forward to achieve the standard.