Legal & General : unveils turn-key modular housing prototype

10 July 2017

Legal & General (L&G) has revealed its first turn-key modular housing prototype as it continues to drive the evolution of the housing sector to help tackle the UK's long term chronic production problem.

Located outside its 550,000 sq ft factory in Selby, near Leeds, the prototype is a two-storey, two-bedroom home. Exploring a range of designs, L&G expects to deliver its first homes in the first half of next year. The Leeds site is building the capacity to produce thousands of homes per year across 8 production lines, employing several hundred local people.

Modular building is quicker and more efficient than traditional house building, delivering homes in a matter of weeks rather than years to consistently high standards. This is achieved by building precision-engineered homes in a factory environment, ensuring accuracy of build, in dry controlled conditions, using state of the art methods and materials. The manufacturing process is highly energy efficient and will be carried out by a stable trained workforce. Constructing the homes from Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), delivers further environmental benefits by storing 1 tonne of CO2 in every m3 of CLT used in the construction of each home. This ensures an economically viable and sustainable solution to deliver much needed capacity for the industry.

Rosie Toogood, CEO of L&G Modular, commented: 'The unveiling our first prototype today marks an exciting and important step in our programme to bring modular homes constructed from CLT to market. This prototype demonstrates the high quality of our modular solutions debunking preconceptions of modular housing. At full production, homes like this will be delivered repeatedly in a matter of weeks without the snagging issues faced by traditional methods.

'L&G has a long heritage in providing housing in the UK and sees modular construction as a natural evolution and extension of its position in this market. Modular construction is set to revolutionise the house building sector bringing new materials along with methods and processes used in industries, such as car-making to raise productivity and help to address the UK's chronic shortfall of new homes.'

L&G has been involved in housing activities for nearly 20 years including: through its stake in CALA Homes; delivering a 1,000 home scheme in Crowthorne through its own house building arm, Legal & General Homes; and investing in a new institutional Build to Rent product. Legal & General more broadly is a significant investor in housing including social housing and student accommodation; and it is bringing housing back to the centre of the UK's cities through large scale mixed-use urban regeneration schemes.

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Legal & General Capital
Legal & General Capital (LGC) is the early-stage investment arm of Legal & General Group. Investing from Legal & General's £6bn principal balance sheet, LGC's purpose is to generate long-term shareholder value by injecting new capital into key sectors where there has been a shortage of investment and innovation. Focused on Housing, Infrastructure (Urban regeneration and Clean Energy) and SME Finance, these key sectors reflect our aim to invest for the long term in economically and socially useful assets, to secure competitive returns and to create new asset classes for Legal & General's varied investment requirements, for our partners and for the wider marketplace. Investments to date have included housebuilder CALA Homes, a Build to Rent joint venture, major urban regeneration projects in Salford, Newcastle, Cardiff and Bracknell, SME finance group Pemberton and clean energy firm, NTR.