MOBIE - the Ministry of Building Innovation and Education

August 15, 2022 Edward Brost

The UK has a housing crisis – not only are we not building enough homes to meet our needs, the quality of the housing that we do build is not good enough. Technology is transforming the way we live, and yet the way we build homes has hardly changed in the last 100 years. We need new ways of thinking and doing to ensure new homes better meet the needs of their occupiers and, crucially, that they reduce their impact on the environment. Home is the most important piece of architecture in our lives.

MOBIE - the Ministry of Building Innovation and Education - was founded in 2017 by the architect and TV presenter George Clarke. MOBIE is all about the future of home design and inspiring the next generation of home designers. We want home building to become a clean, precision engineered, efficient process, with greater emphasis on building quality, efficiency, performance and the needs of home users. And we want the built environment and home industries to become careers of choice for more and more young people.

MOBIE and the Kauri Foundation share the same vision when it comes to alleviating the current global housing crisis, starting with the UK. We align in our vision of securing good homes for everyone, in reducing these home’s environmental impact, and in inspiring the next generation to create the homes of the future.

Manufacturing, from components to whole houses, is part of the answer and is set to become a larger part of the housing market in the UK. Respected consultancies such as Savills and McKinsey predict that homes constructed using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) could make up 20% of all homes built in the UK each year by the end of this decade.

The UK is also currently experiencing a skills and labour crisis. The construction workforce is insufficient to meet current demand. The Construction Skills Network (CITB) estimates that by 2025 the industry will need to recruit 217,000 new workers to meet demand, that is 43,000 per year. This is a result of increased demand for new houses and infrastructure and the demography of the workforce - with 22% of workers over 50, and 15% over 60 set to leave the industry in the next 10-15 years. However, in June 2022 the Financial Times reported that the UK has 244,000 less employees than three years ago due to “a loss of EU workers and early retirees” (Financial Times, 26 June 2022 - https://www.ft.com/content/68bb82f6-9eaa-42d9-afd2-a7af05226a91 ). The demographic ‘time bomb’ has been known about for years with the Modernise of Die report indicating that the annual net loss of workforce will place constraints on our capacity to build homes and infrastructure unless the industry modernises (Modernise or Die, Farmer Review of the UK Construction Labour Force Model, October 2016 - https://www.constructionleadershipcouncil.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Farmer-Review.pdf ).

The labour crisis is compounded by the poor image of construction as it is increasingly unattractive to young people. Recent CITB research indicated that just two per cent of those outside construction see it as their preferred industry to work in! The built environment more widely is largely invisible to schools as a career option – ironic given it is so physically visible and that it employs nearly 9% of the UK workforce. We need to help make the built environment a sector of choice for young people. If construction is going to survive, let alone thrive, we must be visible and more attractive to young people.

On the up side, we have a good story to tell in terms of the positive impact that we can have on people’s lives and the environment. Around 40% of UK carbon emissions come from our buildings (build and operations) so by improving the way we build we can have a positive impact on climate change. Good housing and places improve peoples’ lives, health and wellbeing. For a generation increasingly focused on fairness, values and positively influencing people’s lives, the built environment is a great sector to work in.

This is where MOBIE can play its part. We are inspiring young people about home design, construction and manufacture. We want to show them the difference they can make working in our industry. And we want to ensure that the skills they learn are future proofed for a changing and improving industry – the new skills the industry needs to transform include digital design, sustainable construction, new materials, and offsite manufacturing.

Like MOBIE, we at the Kauri Foundation believe in building homes that exceed and/or surpass building codes and regulations. We stand for creating a higher standard in sustainable community development, and aim to continue spreading educational material on designing housing structures/systems intended to be deployed to conditions with widely variable infrastructural availability and functionality. In constructing green living housing systems, we are working towards building a better environmental future for upcoming generations. In more ways than one, we are bringing land to life around the world!

MOBIE runs design challenges to engage young people from primary school to University, highlighting the creativity needed in the sector and inspiring them to pursue careers in the built environment. The good news is the talent is out there and when asked they get engaged in the built environment and they have amazing ideas for its future. Our most recent design challenge for young Londoners with the Mayor of London attracted over 120 entries from teams and individuals in schools and colleges across London. The home designs and masterplans they produced were truly amazing.

With our education partners we have created an ‘education pathway’ with new modules and complete courses focusing on how to radically improve home design and manufacture.

With Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, we have created specialist units in housing design, offsite and onsite alternative construction methods, the housing industry and renewable energy for housing for their Construction and Built Environment BTEC. From 2023 we will add a specialist qualification in Modern Methods of Construction. We have partnered with Universities to create Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees and a PhD programme – the Home for the Future Innovation Centre courses – in improved ways of designing and manufacturing homes. Working with the Offsite Alliance we are identifying the specific skills that the MMC sector needs to deliver better quality homes, including manufacturing and process thinking, digital design and new technology and materials.

We are excited to be attracting, nurturing and inspiring a future cohort of designers, makers, constructors, developers, planners and surveyors to enter our housing industry. We see this as key to building better, more sustainably and more affordably. Working together we are confident we can leverage the necessary generational shift by attracting the young talent that will renew and reshape our vital industry. At the Kauri Foundation, we know our housing systems will have a generational impact on the families who receive them. We look to have a generational impact on our future designers, engineers, and architects who will continue revolutionizing post-disaster housing. As an immediate impact, our housing systems enable local economic empowerment, by delivering communities a flat-packed, semi-finished product. These structures will need both skilled and unskilled laborers to assemble, which will generate local employment and skill-training for communities involved in building their houses.

Join the Kauri Foundation and MOBIE in advancing construction knowledge and housing resilience around the world by clicking the button below!