On the 2nd December 2025 we were delighted to host a panel discussion in London on demountable and/or meanwhile use accommodation watch the recording. Panellists included Dr. Ellen Grist, Housing Festival (chair), Tom Copley, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development, Jez Sweetland and Andrew Stansbury (Directors, Housing Festival), Darren Alexander, Assistant Director of Housing Demand for London Borough of Havering, Hugh Jeffery, Modular Business Director, Wates Residential, and Angus Fraser, CEO, MMC Homebuilding. Thank you to Places for People and Strata for making this panel discussion possible.
Current examples from Bristol and Havering were unpacked, with the ambition that the Community of Practice will co-create a toolkit to capture the learning and enable similar models to be replicated.
Local authorities across the UK are finding themselves on a burning platform created by the Temporary Accommodation emergency, including over 160,000 children now living in long-term managed homelessness. While the long-term solution is to build more affordable and social rent homes, we also need innovative strategies to alleviate the TA pressure in the short-term.
Bristol City Council and the London Borough of Havering have recently pioneered innovative housing delivery models that could create a significant opportunity in this regard, especially if we can capitalise on learning from these two pathfinder projects and build this collective wisdom into the next iteration(s).
The experience and learning of those that have ‘gone before’ to use and deploy demountable MMC housing on meanwhile sites, such as the Pan-London Accommodation Collaborative Enterprise (PLACE), and other models that have been developed to steward meanwhile spaces, will be critical to help us collaborate further and optimise delivery models. Bristol’s delivery model, where the risk of finding a second site for the homes at the end of the initial lease-term is carried by the financial/MMC supplier, has the potential to address some of the limitations of earlier initiatives and help unlock more private investment to provide better quality and more cost effective TA. The two successful live case studies in Havering and Bristol provide clear evidence that these approaches can succeed and have the potential to scale and provide much needed, cost-effective social infrastructure, that saves public money and provides a much better outcome for some of the most vulnerable households in our communities.
However, the challenge of pace of delivery, moving beyond pilots, and the complexities of delivering through local government were highlighted. Panellists emphasised that while these challenges are real, they are also unavoidable as the context in which we must innovate. Leadership within the local authority setting is crucial in this regard, particularly because innovation requires engaging multiple departments including legal, finance, procurement, housing delivery and homelessness. As Darren Alexander pointed out, homelessness colleagues, for example, are often necessarily focused on day-to-day crisis management challenges and often not properly equipped with sufficient capacity or support to work on longer term strategic solutions, such as collaborating on standardising scalable solutions that can help the whole system improve. Finding key people that can cast vision and lead across these departments within local authorities is therefore key.
Andrew Stansbury added that we must be unswervingly outcomes-focused in our approach if we’re to see progress. If we’re outcome-focused, the emphasis is on finding a way through the processes in place. However, if we’re too process-focused, it heightens the risk of non-delivery as all too often established processes cannot easily accommodate innovation.
There was a positive atmosphere in the room throughout the discussion, and a desire and will to collaborate and co-design a meaningful and comprehensive toolkit encapsulating all the learning so far. It was also discussed how much the private sector could do to make implementation easier for local authorities.
In the new year, we look forward to picking this conversation up and starting work on the toolkit, which will most likely be produced by a consortium of organisations.
Interested in contributing? Please join the Building Better: Community of Practice.
