Experts tell Chancellor: We need £300m for prefabs in the capital

Planning experts are asking the Chancellor for £300 million for prefab homes to help tackle London’s housing crisis.

Chancellor Philip Hammond is being asked to find funds for factory-built housing — first popularised in the Fifties — in addition to a £5 billion homes package set to be announced in the Budget tomorrow.

The homes, built off-site, can be moved into constrained plots and completed in half the time of traditional builds.

Nicky Gavron, chair of the London Assembly planning committee, has written a cross-party letter to the Chancellor requesting more funds. It is backed by housebuilders and government advisers. She said: “We have never reached high housing targets in the past without a significant contribution of factory-built homes. If the Government wants to build 300,000 a year they will have to invest in this.”

In London, 28-storey Apex House in Wembley was completed in nine months by Vision Modular Systems. Another new block with a prefabricated frame is 1 Dalston Lane, set to house dozens of flats and shops over the Crossrail 2 tunnel.

However, the Government must speed up this approach, according to Mark Farmer, who wrote an independent report on the benefits of modular housing. He said Treasury officials “need to get their heads around this and put concrete measures in place to create truly additional capacity”.

Alongside Conservative, Lib Dem and Green leaders in the London Assembly, Ms Gavron is asking the Treasury to put £300 million extra into the Accelerated Construction Fund which Mayor Sadiq Khan can access. Ms Gavron believes 20 per cent of new homes in London could be factory-built.