A large section of wall dangles from the arm of a crane over a half-finished house in Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire, slowly lowering towards the waiting crew who will fix it into place.
This factory-made timber skeleton arrived at the site in the morning on a lorry, and can be assembled by a team of six workers by the end of the same day. Pre-assembled roof trusses, on the ground nearby, will be lifted into place to cap the structure.
Timber construction has long been widely used in North America, Scandinavia and Scotland, but has struggled for traction in England — where houses are typically still built by hand out of bricks and blocks.
“It is a bit like the wolf and three pigs story. People assume brick and masonry will last longer,” said Oliver Novakovic, innovation director at Barratt Redrow, one of the country’s largest housebuilders, which owns the Cotgrave development.
England’s biggest housebuilders are all now pushing to build more with timber. Barratt Redrow builds nearly 30 per cent of its homes from timber, and Novakovic said the share could ultimately be as high as half.
Behind the shift is a worsening shortage of the skilled labour that the industry will need to meet the government’s ambitious target for 1.5mn new homes by 2029, as well as looming environmental regulations that will demand better insulation and less carbon-intensive materials.
The sweeping planning policy changes brought in by Sir Keir Starmer’s administration could help push housing supply to 305,000 annually by 2029, according to the forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog.
Industry remains sceptical that this scale of construction can be achieved without financial help for buyers still squeezed by high mortgage rates, or an easing of lending rules.
But it also likely lacks the capacity to build at this rate — the highest since the 1960s — without changing how houses are built.
Dean Finch, chief executive of FTSE 100 housebuilder Persimmon, said the “step-change in housebuilding that the government wants” was unlikely to happen without “innovations like timber frame combined with bricklike facades”.
The Home Builders Federation industry group estimates the sector would need 240,000 recruits to scale up to 300,000 homes a year. Of those, the biggest shortage is of 20,000 bricklayers, far more than the 11,000 apprentices recruited in the past five years.
However, finding enough bricks for these workers to lay could also prove a problem.
Joe Hudson, chief executive of Ibstock, Britain’s largest brick maker, said UK production capacity of about 2.2bn bricks a year, supplemented with roughly 500mn of imports, could support 250,000 new homes at most.
Finding at least another 500mn bricks, to hit 300,000 homes, presents a challenge.
“You won’t be able to go, in this parliament, and get 500mn bricks of extra capacity, because it takes quite a long time to build a brick factory,” he said.
England’s attachment to brick homes runs deep. The traditional method of construction — a double layer of masonry with a cavity in between — has been little changed over 80 years, since it replaced the solid brick construction favoured before the second world war.
For decades, industry has flirted with a flashier solution to build houses more efficiently. So-called modular construction involves factory-made 3D units, often of entire rooms, delivered to building sites on lorries and then fitted together.
However, the downturn in housebuilding over the past two years, brought on by higher interest rates, has killed off several of the most promising modular builders. L&G closed its factory after racking up £176mn of losses over seven years. TopHat, backed by Goldman Sachs and Persimmon, closed last year.
Andrew Shepherd, formerly an executive at TopHat and now managing director of Ibstock’s innovation division, said the technology was useful for many types of buildings, including apartment blocks, but not well suited to housebuilding.
Building with 3D pods is more expensive, requiring greater up-front investment, and it gives little flexibility on design. “What I would describe as the 2D, panelised option, I see as being more suitable for the [housebuilding] market,” he said.
The 2D method was on display at the Derby factory of Oregon Timber Frame, which supplied the Cotgrave development. Timbers are cut and nailed together in panels up to 10m long down three production lines, according to detailed instructions given on computer screens.
Computer-guided metal stops and rollers ensure the frames are square and correctly positioned, while a menacing-looking automatic nailing machine assists with the more intensive steps, such as attaching the boards to the outside of the frame.
At full capacity, roughly 200 workers can produce the timber structure for 32 houses every day, which are flat packed on to lorries like sophisticated Ikea kits — complete with a labelled box of bolts and fittings.
Once delivered to the development site, a timber frame house usually takes between 12 and 14 weeks to finish, compared with 20 for traditional masonry construction.
Barratt bought Oregon Timber, and its existing factory in Selkirk in southern Scotland, in 2019, before investing £45mn in the more advanced Derby facility to supply England.
Rivals are moving in the same direction. Taylor Wimpey and Bellway want to build 30 per cent of their homes using timber by 2030. Persimmon has invested in its own factory, and has planning permission for a second.
Timber is considered a more environmentally friendly building material, and the gaps within the timber framing make it easier to insulate without making the wall thicker and losing precious square footage.
Industry is awaiting new regulations, soon to be published, that will boost energy efficiency standards for homes in the next two or three years. Executives expect this to be followed by rules designed to push lower-carbon building materials.
Crucially, however, customers and local planners want the appearance of a brick house — which, for the industry, means that a brick skin is still essential.
“The majority of the timber-frame homes in England will have a brick outer skin. I think it is quite deep in the psychology for planning, [and] in the psychology for the consumer,” said David Thomas, chief executive of Barratt Redrow. “They essentially look identical.”
The brick facade over timber houses could soon become thinner, with the industry searching for hi-tech versions of brick-effect wallpaper.
Several housebuilders have backed a facade product from supplier Mauer that looks like brick but can be applied to the timber frame in the factory.
Ibstock is also investing in new products, using thin bricks. Hudson hopes these “will bridge the gap” in brick production to hit 300,000 homes.
Its factory in Nostell, Yorkshire — which was closed in 2020 when Covid-19 paused construction — is being redeveloped to produce a wider range of brick and ceramic products.
On the factory floor, workers fit sections of a yellow gas pipe wide enough to carry a bowling ball, which will feed a new 120m kiln, lined with 1,800 rollers, that will fire bricks at about 1,200 degrees Celsius.
Thin bricks are already widely used to give brick finishes on buildings including high-rise blocks, often with these so-called brick slips held in place by metal rails.
The key new product designed for housebuilders is a panel, a few feet square, of 1.5cm thin bricks stuck to a patented backing material, which can be fixed to timber frame walls with just four screws.
However, this shift to new materials carries risks. Factories add fixed overheads for housebuilders in an industry where sales are highly cyclical.
Aynsley Lammin, analyst at Investec, said big builders would probably not push timber above 50 per cent of their “normalised” output, because they wanted the flexibility to reduce construction in a market downturn without leaving the factories idle.
They also have to boost confidence in England around fire safety, longevity and maintenance. “There is the risk that homebuyers prefer what they see as a more solid block and brick-built house,” Lammin said.
Despite environmental pressures and workforce strains, the question is whether the English buyers will ever give up their attachment to brick houses — even once the brick appearance is only skin deep.
“It has a similarity to moving away from diesel engines or petrol engines,” said Thomas. “At an extreme, you could see an environment where there are no longer bricks. That could be in 50 years’ time, or 100 years’ time, but there is a need to evolve these technologies.”
