Blog written by Neil Lock, Operations Director, Morgan Sindall Construction, Northern Home Counties.
For anyone interested in successful project delivery, the maxim ‘Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things’ is always compelling.
If you want to be exceptional, it’s not enough to be a safe pair of hands who approaches tasks in the way they have always been approached. There’s a need take the responsibility of standing back, asking questions and being challenging where and when that’s appropriate.
In my experience of residential builds, effectiveness has become an even more powerful dynamic. We are in a period of transition. Modern Methods of Construction (MMC), changing market dynamics around materials and labour, and a shifting regulatory backdrop around sustainability are pushing development away from the status quo. It’s not happening as quickly as some might like, but the pace can change.
As a top tier contractor, Morgan Sindall Construction has welcomed the continuing rise of MMC. It’s happening partly because the government wants it to progress – MMC is regarded as a means of driving up productivity and forcing down emissions. That belief is filtering down to Homes England, local authorities and housing associations with increasing weight, and will have impacts with private sector developers and funders.
Property development comes with manifold challenges but to an extent the residential market is lagging behind other sectors. Commercial office, hospitality, leisure and education are ahead when it comes to taking advantage of the opportunity to reduce the risk of the any given programme.
The benefits of more programme certainty are there for all to see. First, by replacing on-site work tasks with prefabricated elements manufactured under factory conditions, MMC lets the contractor have more control and can therefore increase the quality of the finished build. Secondly, low carbon is quite simply the issue of our time. Take the humble example of using a piece of plasterboard. On site, it may be cut to fit a design, and the perhaps one quarter of the sheet thrown into the skip as waste. The same task pushed through a pre-manufactured route would be designed so there was almost no waste material at all.
Every decision taken in the development process has environmental consequences. As a group Morgan Sindall has long understood this and is a trailblazer, with a transformational approach to sustainability and achieving our own target of Net Zero Carbon by 2030. There are many elements to the plan. They involve our customers, supply chain and employees, but MMC is at the core, a powerful choice when it comes to carbon reduction and delivering more sustainable, future-ready communities.
