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sustainable placemaking forum 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP tel. 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 |
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seminar proceedings |
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A seminar series organised by HTA Architects Ltd Report of seminar held on customer choice held on 10 July 2000 in London Main conclusions Much of the housing produced in the UK would never be purchased if buyers had a real choice. Most of the homes are the equivalent to the East German Trabant which disappeared when consumers were able to exercise choice Few people express pleasure with their new homes Consumers know what they don't like but not necessarily what they want: they need informed choice Change in the car industry came through revolution in the supply chain. The same change is needed in housing where by eliminating the 15% waste, real choice could be achieved In social housing quality is higher: tenants are more concerned about their neighbours and the local environment and less with deficiencies in their homes Structural difficulties in planning, the financial risks housebuilders face and the fact that they can sell homes inhibits them from attempting to produce more radical products The monopoly in land supply, and the under-supply in the south east is another inhibiting factor to competition through innovation Introduction - Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects Ltd Our purpose of this series is to define the term 'placemaking' and to set that out towards the end in a 'manifesto'. We are keen to clarify the issues and to do so with people from outside our organisation, to ensure that what we are talking about is well founded and understood and something that people feel is appropriate. We believe that placemaking is what we will be doing in the future. There is not a well defined set of words that fit what we mean by it. We clearly understand that it not something that can be done by one discipline or one organisation. It has to be done in partnership. It isn't just architecture, or urban design. It is very much about the whole place, taking into account the experience of people who choose to live in a particular location - and then their experience of living there. It means taking into account all sorts of factors about their lives apart from just the physical and environmental considerations. It is a very wide agenda and one we are very keen to understand and to try to deliver, particularly on large scale projects. Today we are talking about the central role of the consumer. Next we will get down to the kit - how to build it. Thereafter we want to expand it again to the design of the environment and how to manage it - a larger canvas. Guest speaker at the seminar was Malcolm Pitcher, a director of PCL and In-house Research. He specialises in marketing, brand strategy, culture change, change management, marketing research and customer satisfaction monitoring. He has been marketing director for Wimpey Homes and held senior posts with Volkswagen and Honda. Look at the Trabant. Advertisements as recently as 1988 show customers looking longingly at this car. They show a woman who had probably been on a waiting list for five years to own one: it was now her pride and joy. It was all you could buy in East Germany at the time - choice didn't have a lot to do with it. The Trabie was awful, unreliable, polluting from its two stroke engine, badly screwed together with something called 'duroplast', and it was dull. Unfortunately when I interview a lot of new home owners in this country, they also talk about their homes being unreliable, badly screwed together and dull. Taking a positive note, at least you could the Trabie got you from A to B - while a house puts a roof over your head. We can imagine a 1988 press release proclaiming satisfaction among customers: "We are delighted with consumer demand for our car.. demand exceeds supply… eager buyers are snapping up everyone we can build.. we must be doing something right" Eighteen months after that advertisement appeared, the factory died and is now a museum. They built three million Trabies, hardly changing the design at all. It died because people were suddenly able to realise choice. They dumped their Trabies, the waiting list went and they began driving Golfs and Polos they had seen on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Choice had a tremendous impact. Typical of the kind of car they desired at the time was a mid range Ford Escort. A much sounder proposition; it was what people wanted. Bring that forward and for the same real price eleven years later, you get the Ford Focus, the biggest seller in the UK. It has power assisted steering, radio, air-conditioning, air bags, anti-lock brakes, three years warranty, umpteen finance options and a list of optional extras as long as your arm. That has to be paid for. To achieve it, Ford cut weight, used modern recycled materials used, built in 85% recyclablity, and - significantly - cut manufacturing costs and time It is a million miles away from what was being sold by Ford 12 years ago. It is an amazing leap in customer choice and value. It doesn't surprise me that it was a car man - Sir John Egan - who told us the way to go in construction. He was just saying basically what Ford and the rest of the motor industry has been doing for the last twelve years. The dynamics of choice It is interesting to ask ourselves: how much choice comes from customers dreaming up something that they want? The answer here is very little. A little comes from legislation, but the vast majority comes from competitive forces. The competition is breathing down your neck all the time in the car market. As in so many markets, consumers are being pulled into areas that they previously thought were unimaginable. When I worked in Honda, I was asked to do a European marketing plan for a new Civic model. I collected the data from 23 countries. I built up folders of paper. My Japanese boss asked me politely to put it all on to two sheets of A3 paper: he didn't want the R&D people to see big fat reports. He said to me: "You have just got to let the designers breathe. If you stifle them with too much of how it is going to be, and this is the way we are going to do it, you end up with mediocrity." Observing consumer behaviour can deliver solutions. Honda teams will spend considerable amounts of time just observing motorists' behaviour. For example, we spent days on the Spanish/French border in August watching people tow caravans so we could observe the European use of tow hitches and have information that we could share with the designers We spent weekends in supermarket car parks in Germany watching families putting shopping into hatchbacks, just to see if there was a better solution that we could offer these consumers that neither they or we had thought about. It begs the question: ultimately, do consumers know what they want? The old idea that you go to the customer ask them, and build it, and they'll then beat a path to your door, died donkeys years ago. My belief is that consumers know less and less about what they want. If the world was based on asking consumers what they want and supplying it, PC World would not exist. All we ever wanted was a simple computer to do a few home accounts, a bit of word processing and the odd games. If manufacturers had simply provided those, we would still be buying rubber Brother keyboards and Sinclair ZX81s. Advertisements for computers provide a language which did not exist three years ago and the educated consumer now knows and understands it. Consumers didn't 'want' this - a carrot was dangled in front of them. But sometimes customers do know what they want - 'I want that Trabie and I'll wait for it.' 1988 East Germany. Sometimes they do but they think it's unobtainable: 'One day I'm going to have a car. One day I am not going to live on this estate, I'm going to have a house, a real place to live that expresses my individuality - one day.' But sometimes they don't know what they want until the market educates them. There is a huge difference between consumer choice and informed consumer choice. I believe the housing industry is failing to effectively inform consumers about choice. The 'Trabie' house That mock press release about the Trabie actually was put out by a housebuilder three years ago. That housebuilder's product exists in Abbey Meads, Swindon where 15 builders have competed vigorously, building thousands of homes for what was supposed to be a new town of the twenty first century. (The plans showed lakes, boats and families enjoying themselves - those haven't come yet: they are building the homes first!) I don't know anybody who really enjoys living there. It's a 'shrug your shoulder' place - if you want to buy new in Swindon it's the only place you can buy. It'll do and it's close to the shops. I don't hear anyone say: 'This is wonderful, this new town of the twenty first century; it's so different I'm so pleased to be here.' Some of the houses are poor. I keep going back to look at the bathroom of one because I can't believe it. There is no shower. If you sneezed on the bath panel it would fall away and crack. Don't we understand that people with young children kneel against the bath to wash their hair? Has anybody observed how buyers live? How come first time buyers buy this stuff? Is it that they are so ill-informed? Does the prospect of the words 'my home' get in the way of any rational thinking about how they are going to use this product? Indeed I believe it does: most people don't see these things when they buy a new home. Has any competitor in Abbey Meads used specification and choice to differentiate their product? They can't have. These £90,000 brand new houses are being sold to eager first time buyers - it makes me so angry. I get wound up when I walk in, because it is so unnecessary. If this industry grabbed some of the ideals of the motor industry, customers wouldn't just have a shower.. they would have downlighters and who knows what else, all for the same price. It is a Trabie house. It is built by one of our big builders that ought to be setting the future agenda. There is a huge gap between what we could do if we put our minds to it and what we actually do. Informed first time buyers would understand the opportunities that might be available round the corner and would not ever choose such a house. What you see in some of the other markets is the trend towards showing them something that they had never dreamed of before. People couldn't have thought of the Ford Focus in their wildest dreams. Why is housing so unlike this - why is there so much imperfect information out there? Why are we not competing and showing people new opportunities, or just not getting them across to people? Research to inform How do we engage the consumer? How do we enable buyers to understand the potential choices and to enable the decision makers to make the right decisions? The only way is through some kind of informed research process. We should be observing how people use their homes. I interview people for clients, anything from a £50,000 starter to a £600,000 homes. I can always find things that could make the house better - often tiny things. Observing how they use their homes and how they live is the entry point. A friend of mine in the States says: "Communities and houses are complex issues . We must observe and have the opinions of a large number of people." In her opinion "a handful of focus groups just don't cut it". Focus groups have their purpose but not in some of the things we are talking about today. Housing is a very emotional subject it is very difficult to control the emotions of consumers in a focus group. I don't knock them - I use them and conduct them myself but there are certain times when we need that bigger, broader set of data. It is interesting that there were few focus groups involved in the development of the Ford Focus. We've got to listen to people, understand their behaviours, their preferences and we have got to understand their experiences. There is a lot of emotion in delivering choice to consumers. But current market research rarely informs design. It is often more about consumer attitudes to our design rather than 'let's have a look at your lifestyle'. Too much of it is rear view mirror analysis rather than looking into the future. Somehow we need to give consumers the opportunity to look into the future in a rational way. We must measure demographics - to define the different segments of the market that respond to different types of housing and stimuli and we must measure their satisfaction with what they currently have. If some builders would spend more time going back to understand how the fruits of their labour impacts on people's lives, what a difference it might make to our future planning. Are some builders scared? If I built that bathroom I'd be damn scared. We have to inform consumers because it's about giving people the information to make informed decisions. It's about using lots of visuals to talk about design. It's about identifying those hot features that appeal to specific groups of people. It's about testing the conventional and finding some way to test the alternatives. Commercial realities Clearly, some people are wary about homes and places that are too much of a fashion statement - if I buy a home, I want to think that I can get out of it in seven years time. There's also a commercial reality. We've got to find ways of testing willingness to pay and to test the effects of new information and how that impacts on consumers' thinking. We have got to be careful to that we don't use too much of a blundberbuss approach. "Design research [as it's called in the States] helps to achieve the best fit between users and design and products in the environment. In the home building industry design research is discover community and house and builder product suit or create home buyers desires." That is interesting. It's not just 'is this going to suit you?' ' it's more about 'does this create new desires in you?' We want to work with you to help you understand what the opportunities are to see if we can create new housing and community concepts in your mind. We have got to balance the commercial reality and emotion. This research reduces risk. It asks about communities visions and economic realities. But, as they have found in the States, it can help to gain approvals too, because you can make an application with well balanced research. It's particularly true if you are trying to push the unconventional. The result is the development of land use, transportation and community design concepts that are achievable. We could put lots of wild and wonderful ideas in front of the consumers. But if they are not commercial what is the point of raising expectation with things we can't possibly achieve? At the same time we must avoid the brick walls that the car and shipbuilding industry came up with 20 years ago. Then everyone said: 'It ain't possible'. Some laughed at the Japanese. 'You can't build a car in Japan and bring it over here - they must be losing tons of money - the British people will never buy a Japanese car. We are safe and secure keeping yesterday a little bit longer.' That’s what they were thinking at BMC. They rejected the whole idea that something so radical approach could achieve something in the marketplace. Research in practice I believe that to get this mass information across, we can very effectively use the power of the web. Coffee Creek Centre is a web site developed by an architect practice in the States. Their site asks people to help design a new centre. They request demographic and personal details, and according to how you answer these questions, you work through different routes - you are not shown a $1 million house if all you can afford is something much cheaper. You are asked where you would like your home located - it explains the financial implications of going to a particular location. It asks how you would like your main street to look and feel. In this case, people liked the street café environment but they wouldn't have understood that unless they had been shown the options. Then there's the streetscape. How you would like your corner store to look and what do you want it to sell? What kind of services do you want within five minutes of your home? Which type of park would you like? They are trying to gauge how people behave when they become more informed about the options that are opened up to them. There is a whole screen on the environmental impact of your home. It asks whether you want just a basic, intermediate or an advanced healthy house. It asks which of the healthy house features such as air, water, materials and energy saving and how much would you be prepared to pay. Delivering choice Success will be a combination of allowing designers to breathe and giving people informed choices. I think the web helps to bring this detail in front of them. That Trabie advert was just 12 years ago. The company that was destroyed through choice. I can’t help thinking that there is a potential for a revolution in housing in this country. I cannot believe that people still want to live in what they too often regard as low spec dull houses on great big housing estates. But that is all the choice they have, just as that was all the choice people had in the late 80s in East Germany was a Trabie. I honestly believe that if we can bring new ideas to people they will react favourably towards them. There is plenty we can learn from other industries. I know a builder in Indianapolis who speaks about housing in a way that I have never heard anybody speak. He says: "Don't follow where the path may lead. Go where there is no path, and leave a trail." The second speaker was Florence Hunt of HTA's subsidiary USER Research, which has been involved in tenant and resident research and consultation for two decades. I heartily endorse Malcolm Pitcher's point of view. My first ten years in market research were spent in the new product development department of an advertising agency. The culture was about innovation and continuous improvement: we were seeking to make pitches to clients with new ideas, to help fill market gaps and develop opportunities. The culture was very different to what I found in 1980 in housing, a very conservative market concerned with keeping things as they are. After 120 projects I am now an expert on places that people do not want. For a lot of people there isn't very much to like. The character of places varies considerably and for many people what they like is the antithesis of what they have. When we went to Thamesmead in 1985 there were few facilities and just a bit of country. Some people liked the fact that it was quiet and tranquil. But for two thirds of the population it was a very boring place to live. There was no way of getting to know anyone because they were socially isolated both by their architecture, and the fact that were no play areas for parents with children to meet. There were no cafes - you couldn't even buy fish and chips. That was no life. I always say it is not about housing, it's about having a life in a place. Asking people what they want Do residents know what they want? People have tiny kitchens, but if you asked people what they do want, they don't ask for a large kitchen because they don't realise it is possible. People can respond to ideas but they are not necessary capable generating the ideas themselves. If you want people contribute ideas they have to know the parameters of possibility, because they don't think come up with the sort of ideas that trained designers will dream up. If you go into any area and do 20 interviews you can usually find out all the prevailing attitudes - after 20 you rarely come up with anything new. There are few creative individuals and any ideas that come up during research usually tend to get totally lost because there is no process for developing them. We decided to investigate interest in ultra-modern housing and how keen people were on new ideas. We went and interviewed people who had bought or were thinking of buying new houses. It became apparent that there was not a sense of pleasure in living in them. First time buyers were having to make compromises about where they lived. They wanted much more control over the internal design of their homes - instead they had to choose what there was. People who were buying old properties were doing so because they could exercise more creative choice about how the home would be - it gave them more choice. Focus groups and other approaches It is very fashionable to conduct focus groups. The problem is that group leaders can sway people and people are very inhibited from speaking out against a prevailing view. If you really want to know and understand the market, you do as well to talk in depth to those 20 individuals and try and understand the discriminations and choices they make. The skill of a focus group is listening, observing and understanding how people operate. Sometimes you can come up with ideas during the group and you can play them back. The more stimulating material you have, as Malcolm Pitcher indicates, the more you can help people become creative. They can provide an opportunity for brainstorming, playing out ideas with people who can talk about the pros and cons. When you interview them on their own they don't see the disadvantages of the shower in bathroom. Had you put it into the group, someone would have come up with it. That is the value of community involvement of designers working with a community. But not enough people of the right type come to meetings. How do we get in touch with them? We have to look for other opportunities. USER Research has been researching people's aspirations in Shoreditch and Stepney Green New Deal areas. We are developing central Internet access so that people can come in participate. Questionnaires provide an opportunity to sort of build on in the future. The problem for many people is that they don't come to community participation meetings because they are at work, they are busy. If they can do it at their own convenience it may be possible to inspire them. If you do, it is important that you have a representative group. The problem with the Internet that the people who reply are not necessarily representative. It's a useful sounding board. If you can develop a panel of people who will communicate with you, it may enable people to participate more. Most of our work has been with regenerating estates all over the country. When we do surveys it takes us a lot of time because we want to present people with informed choice. Sometimes it is a question of newsletters explaining options. Then we send the interviewers round and to take people through - you know that very few people have bothered to read what they are sent but at least they have been given the opportunity. With the new technologies and the possibility of virtual reality we can get much further in that direction. The challenge is to develop a culture that welcomes change and wants to improve. It is inspired and creative people who understand the total picture that will help us get somewhere in the future. Discussion Tenants and choice Choice has been described in relation to the product. My impression is that social housing tenants are concerned not so much about where they live but who they live with. It is a Trabant culture, where people have no choice. A typical reaction is tears of joy when someone gets a three bedroom house with a garden. The tears of distress are about who you share the neighbourhood with - the 'other people'. As landlords we are coping with high demand whereas in the motor industry there is over-supply. Housing association If you go back and carry out tenant satisfaction surveys, people are generally very positive about their home but are already fed up with their neighbours after a year. Five years later when the family has grown, things change. Then they become more concerned about noise and where to leave the kids' bikes: they claim they are stolen if left in the front garden. They are concerned about the surrounding environment. On the Aylesbury estate people like their flats, but just hate the rest of the road. Nevertheless, there are things that we can do to help to improve their homes. We have also found that if you offer social housing tenants something different, with more radical architectural options, they seem excited. A lot of the homes built by housing associations in the 1990s look quite boring - they were effectively designed to meet the needs of maintenance managers! But one of the issues we did find when we loosened the reins was a rise in maintenance problems. Housing association Our experience from early days has shown that even in tower blocks which were pretty poor, there was a substantial minority who enjoyed them. We have to be careful about preconceptions. Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects Roger Humber, former director of the housebuilders federation, says the essence of the industry in the UK is buying land, and housebuilders' real skill goes into acquiring the site. Once the housebuilder has the site, that builder becomes the monopolistic supplier of new homes in that location. The one in ten people who want a new home have to go there. Likewise social housing - its customers have no choice either. However, the sector behaves responsibly, and makes efforts to satisfy customer expectations all the same. The big conundrum is how we are going to get a breakthrough to a market in new homes which is driven by customer choice. And how long are we going to continue with the situation where social housing is about bricks and mortar dedicated to poorer people? The sector provides better quality than richer people can afford to buy, yet regardless of quality, it is stigmatised. I think housing benefit has to change to bring in real customer choice by putting cash or vouchers in the hands of tenants as suggested by Frank Field. We need to scrap social housing as a distinct tenure, and allow tenants to shop around. When we do get proper competition in both the social and home ownership sectors then there will be a transformation very quickly. Bernard Hunt, HTA Architects Commercial realities We are going through a TV marketing exercise at the moment. You don't actually see any houses. It's to do with lifestyles, people, their expectations and how they see their individual way of living. But we find it very difficult not to clear cost out of our minds. It is at the centre of the industry. We have plan so many years ahead the way we will build a product and sell it, and then move on - it is at the heart of what we do. To set that aside, let designers breathe and give people a bespoke service providing everything that you anticipate they might want, is very difficult. Developing unique products, allowing architects to build to their optimum can be very costly. There is the problem of scale. House builders are large organisations who have to refer back to shareholders. Maybe we need a rule to stop them becoming too big, to reduce down to much smaller scales so that you can have a greater element of flexibility. We spend £millions buying sites unconditionally, facing the risk that you will be able to build sufficient houses to a sufficient quality - perhaps in two or three years when the market might be dipping down. We have to balance out risk with what we can provide. It is not an easy balance. If we at Berkeley Homes find it difficult building houses which are quite expensive, what is it going to be like for a company specialising on the cheaper end of the market where they depend on economies of scale? We do try and develop to the requirements of particular sites. We have a scheme where the Royal Arsenal site at Woolwich helps define what we can provide and the market we can sell to. But we face problems: the planning authority may be expecting far greater integration of the affordable housing than we are showing at the moment. We are offering it on two parts of the site which don't have river views: this causes political problems. There is a ceiling on the market in Woolwich. It is a question of finding the right balance between refurbishing listed buildings: integration, is not easy. Perhaps the industry has failed but is understandable when you look at the risks of buying the sites in London and the south east. There is inherent nervousness in my company and many others in trying to anticipate whether we are going to move towards more modern forms of architecture and new ways and styles of living. Look at Fulham - a popular location with high prices. But homes there are traditional Victorian houses, expensive to run, and damp. It's ironic that people will pay a lot of money for them. Chris Watts, Berkeley Homes Laing Homes pulled out of the bottom end of the market seven years ago. Our philosophy has changed. We, along with some of the other less volume driven housebuilders, realise we make proportionately less money out of the sale of standard units, than you by giving purchasers options to buy extras - it is becoming a good potential money spinner. There a few opportunities for that on large scale volume schemes and for most first time buyers. Anything is generally better than what they have now - they have their feet on the first rung of the housing ladder. Once you start to go up market, customers are more discerning. More developers are looking for opportunities to give the customer what they want - and the potential is there to make money. We don't go as far as checking caravans at the border in research. But at our demonstration home at the Ideal Home Exhibition, people were interested in the ability to have each room wired into the Internet through a data outlet and in having functions in the house controlled by remote PC. That was very successful - there was a lot of interest. Robert Gray, Laing In a market where the land prices are high, it is about relative cost. Costs of management processes are small compared with the land values. But if we were just able to spend some time and give ourselves confidence exploring new ideas we might be able to move forward. Our experience shows that the private sector's incredible concentration on the bottom line does squeeze out the most basic attempts to try to sort out those process issues. Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects What I find interesting about Swindon Abbey Mead is that there have been umpteen competing developers but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. Andrew Cobb, Sentinel Housing Group I thought it interesting that no lakes had been created… My experience is that with local authorities in London, if there is planning gain, they expect it to be provided. Chris Watts, Berkeley Homes Quality I can sympathise with developers like Berkeley: land costs are a very high proportion of total scheme costs. It can take two years to get planning permission - which means an additional interest cost. Recently some of the more interesting architecture has been in inner cities such as Leeds and Glasgow. I think it is because land values are so low there. But it is partly because they are creating a market from scratch, and they can sell the homes. We have got some opportunities in social housing in big regeneration schemes. Housing association I have never bought a new house because they are dreadful. It is not technology - it is between the ears! Supplier Where we work with developers they will provide some homes for sale and some for us. The private sector homes are the Trabants - ours are the Escorts. Typically, in that situation what would be a three bedroom house for sale will be a two bed house for rent because of our space standards. What we develop ourselves is, I would say, far more innovative and interesting than is the case with private developers. That is bizarre because we don't have a market relationship with our consumers. Developers have to sell theirs! We could build rabbit hutches - worse than Trabants - and still have people queuing up. Housing association I am very interested in the issue of quality of finish and the fact that the standard of the product in social housing may be higher. In my company, we have built our reputation on providing a bespoke product, providing what people want. But the more you do that, the more you get drawn into higher costs. We do find it difficult to control. With the degree of turnover staff that you get at times of high market values, keeping continuity to meet individual requirements is a problem. So I can understand why volume developers go for lowest common denominator, building some cheap homes and moving quickly on to the next site. I am not sure there is any easy answer to that. There certainly isn't an easy answer in the south east where you have very significant pressures of land costs, planning controls and bureaucracy, and the whole process that keeps costs rising and reduces the possibility of flexibility. Chris Watts, Berkeley Homes Supply There is nothing in the demographic figures which tells us anything other than that there is going to be rising demand in the south east and continuing demand on local authorities from the poorest people. The state will go on housing them. We are all are under impossible pressure but the key issue in bringing in choice - and helping to create successful communities - is to increase supply. Housing association At the moment the only way the government is actually supplying affordable housing is through the development industry. I am seeing more and more London boroughs setting higher and higher targets on the housing sites I deal with. That is OK in a situation where the economy is doing well, but what happens when it dips down? You may not get any supply. I don't know how we get round this but I think that the planning process is getting out of sync with the market. The government has to be very careful. It cannot expect the development industry to provide it all. Another difficult issue is integration - how do we include the social housing so that we do get a sense of place and don't isolate people in affordable housing from those who are very rich and get the river view. I think this may be more critical than supply. Chris Watts, Berkeley Homes Scale Instead of working to make things smaller, perhaps we should look at industries where by making themselves bigger, people have been able to deliver the customer choice and flexibility by using more advanced manufacturing technology. As Malcolm Pitcher has explained, by putting performance information into the hands of consumers, people then make choices and the whole of the manufacturing process is geared to backing that up. So that instead of buying a single product, it is tailored to individual needs. That has enabled companies to grab larger slices of their markets. What would happen if an external manufacturer comes in from Holland or Japan and use technologies that they have already developed? If they were to bring in an 'over the Berlin wall' level of choice, I suspect they would capture a significant sector of the market quickly. Nowadays, people's individual requirements should not slow down the supply chain - appropriate technology is in use in other sectors. You can test a prototype off-line and only build it when you know it is going to work. But that is expensive and only worthwhile doing if you are going to build a lot of them - which again relates to economies of scale, with bigger players in the market. The whole integration of the supply chain can be handled by technology so that when someone does order 100 units, the sub contracts and supply chain are already in place. You develop and integrate it so you have an internal market that is geared towards producing for the customer. Rory Bergin, HTA Architects I don't think you can divorce scale from the issues. The way the housebuilding industry operates tends to be through a very linear approach - you buy land, get planning permission, draw up plans, get on site and build it. For a company to change its ethos towards project management and a bespoke service, is not easy to handle. I don't thing we necessarily will get it by becoming bigger. Chris Watts, Berkeley Homes Change We do have to overcome some barriers to change. In managing housing for local authorities we are forever finding that when we try to change the service, to reinvent and improve. We are allowed to go so far. But at some point in time the council says it is too risky. Bureaucracy swamps you and does its worst to stop innovation. Until you break those circles, you can't move forward. Finding ways round this is essential. John Swinney, Pinnacle Speculative builders could change things tomorrow if they wanted: I appreciate social housing has many more constraints. Developers at present are building for stock, as a wholesaler. I think change will come when there is a change to build-to-order - it requires a fundamentally different structure and different ethos. John Tebbit, Corus Ford didn't need to make the Focus a brilliant car. They could have just made it adequate. So I think the aim should be the desire to be not only just good enough but to thrash the living daylights out of the opposition. I don't think there is anybody in housebuilding who really wants to do that. The problem is not the technology. There is no desire to be excellent. Supplier There are areas of deprivation in owner occupied estates built 20-25 years ago. I'm not saying that is just down to design mistakes but it is a factor. It will help concentrate our minds in social housing. I believe it will be a driving force. Andrew Cobb, Sentinel On Aylesbury estate the interviews were extremely interesting where we were explaining the opportunity to increase densities. That is a pretty dramatic proposition but it showed how it was possible to hit the 'buttons' that are crucial for the residents. It means we are able to get on quickly, get some cross-subsidy into it, and provide a mix of residents who would be able to help sustain local services. Schemes like this do provide opportunities not just in terms of who your neighbours might be but also in the management and control. We believe that we have got just about enough critical mass with the 14,000 homes (both in the private and public sectors) in all the schemes that we are involved in. We are going to try and think of ways in which we can allow designers to breath a bit and think about that supply chain. Someone has got to start somewhere. Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects Comments So many contributions come back to a common theme. In the south east housing is working like a typical market. So long as there is the demand for one million homes there is not the genuine competition which appeared in East Germany a decade ago. Perversely, we in social housing are expected to develop a product as if there were a choice. While it is common to criticise the demands made on us by the Housing Corporation from time to time, we should be grateful that we are being led down the innovation path, backed up by local housing and planning departments which expect far higher standards from us than the private partner. Andrew Cobb, Sentinel If you are looking at deprived communities and social housing, you need to think how you deliver the housing service as well as the lifestyle of those communities and their needs. We need different values to encourage the people moving into that housing to be more considerate to each other, and share the services that they need. People have to get out to work, and we need homework clubs and child care. We need to get funding to see how we can provide centres and provide training. It all needs to be integrated: it is not just about housing. Florence Hunt, USER Research It has been a very interesting debate - it is about coming to grips with the commercial realities. You can't keep an ad campaign like Berkeley's up for long. My fear is that builders following this route will gain more clout but produce ever more Trabies. We need people who want to accept the challenge. Ultimately, value for customers is bought through the back end of the business - the supply chain. Ford has only been able to afford to produce the Focus through manipulating and working with the supply chain - it bears no resemblance to what it was like ten years ago. The savings they have made have enabled them to compete in ways they could only dream of many years ago. I still hear too many builders saying 'it's impossible, can't do that'. They point out that 15% of the cost of building a home is waste. What could we do with that 15%? We could save it - it could go to providing more choice. Ultimately choice and customer focus in housebuilding will only change when management and companies want to do it, and people understand the supply chain, how it can be manipulated and savings made. Those who say it can't be done are using yesterday's model. Tomorrow's model is going to be quite different - we are going to offer people real choice. Malcolm Pitcher This seminar series operates on a 'Chatham House rules' basis. However, many of the participants have already expressed their willingness to have their contributions credited to them. In the other cases, speakers have not yet given clearance - no inference should be drawn from this. Anyone wishing to quote the speakers should speak to them direct for their permission. For further information, contact Chris Bazlinton, Editor on 01279 771468. HTA Architects Limited 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP telephone 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 email hta@hta-arch.co.uk ISDN 0207267 0061
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