Construction Spotlight

The need to build houses not only to higher standards but quickly and at competitive costs poses special manufacturing challenges to the construction industry whose traditional methods are at the same time suffering an erosion of core skills. Offsite fabrication offers a solution to meet some of the new demands.

• Projected ten-fold increase in the uptake of off-site construction methodology in next decade.
• Offsite market value £2.2 billion in 2004. (2.1% of total value of UK construction industry £106.80 billion - future construction viability dictates that this percentage must increase)
• UK Government housing development plan requires 560,000 new homes in next 20 years, 122,000 in the Hampshire county alone.
• Analyst's project that one in four homes, built in the next five years in the US will be steel framed - Europe will rapidly be catching up. In the US steel framing has increased by 300% in the last four years according to the Steel Framing Alliance.

The Egan report, published by the UK Construction Task Force in 1998, on the house building sector in 1998, recommended that house builders needed to focus on different measures to become more efficient and to improve quality and customer satisfaction. The aims set for the construction industry include reducing construction costs, to increase quality and development predictability and to use sustainable construction with more emphasis on prefabrication and off site manufacturing.

SteelTek Systems steel framing solutions meets the aims of the report through the standardisation and pre-assembly of components off-site as well as satisfying this sector's demand for speed of construction and quality.