BB:CoP’s Four Themes for the Year Ahead:
Where Do You Fit In?

As Building Better: Community of Practice (BB:CoP), we are a community built around what the sector actually needs to unlock a significant increase in the supply of new social and affordable homes across the UK. We are pleased to introduce the four interconnected themes shaping our work this year, and to invite you to see where you might fit in. 

Industrialised construction has enormous potential to change the way we build homes in this country. The CoP aims to reveal and untangle the complicated barriers to this; finding solutions which are genuinely useful for the sector and enabling real change to collaboratively drive forward progress. 

When the CoP was launched, we started with questions- hearing a broad spectrum of views and opinions, so that our work can reflect and bring together a disconnected industry. We asked practitioners across the sector; housing associations, manufacturers, architects, local authorities, researchers, developers and more- What was holding them back, what they needed, and what they believed was possible. 

The responses were notably consistent, pointing clearly to four interconnected themes at the heart of why industrialised construction fails to deliver at the scale the housing crisis demands. These themes will shape BB:CoP events, discussions and resources over the next year: 

THEME 1
The Enabling Ecosystem: Shifting perception and narrative 

The Challenge: Deep-rooted misconceptions and entrenched sector mentalities create a lack of clarity of opportunity, limiting confidence to act.

The Opportunity: Build understanding through education, advocacy and leadership to enable confident, sector-wide adoption. 

Even within the sector, the word “MMC” still carries misconceptions around cost, quality, speed and logistics. These are perceptions that practitioners encounter regularly, from clients, commissioners, planners and communities who haven’t yet had reason to think differently. The misconceptions are in the absence of a compelling, consistent counter-narrative. 

These perceptions limit the confidence of clients, commissioners and communities to take the leap. Shifting the narrative isn’t just a communications challenge, it’s a precondition for everything else. The CoP is bringing together the evidence, the voices and the leadership needed to educate and shift the conversation.

THEME 2
Delivery Excellence: Best practice in project and programme delivery  

The Challenge: MMC is routinely forced into traditional systems and processes ill-suited to it. Without a level playing field, compliance alone demands excellence. 

The Opportunity: Establish excellent ways of working to unlock delivery, raise the bar, and build confidence to scale. 

Industrialised construction works best when the whole system around it- procurement, planning, contracts, finance – is designed with it in mind. Too often, MMC gets squeezed into procurement frameworks, contract templates and planning processes that were designed for bricks and mortar. The result is friction, cost and risk that shouldn’t exist. In those conditions, getting a project over the line demands an unfair level of effort and expertise from teams trying to deliver it. 

Along with those practitioners who have managed to navigate these conditions, we aim to surface that knowledge, codify it, and make it accessible. 

THEME 3 
Proving Value: Realising advanced manufacturing benefits  

The Challenge: Insufficient pipeline and scale, combined with short-term decision making, means the true value of industrialised construction hasn’t yet been realised. 

The Opportunity: Embed advanced manufacturing to deliver measurable value. 

The promise of industrialised construction (less time on site, high quality, lower whole-life costs, reduced carbon) is well understood in theory. In practice, it remains difficult to demonstrate at scale, partly because the conditions required to realise that value haven’tconsistently been in place. 

Short-term procurement decisions, fragmented pipelines and a lack of repeatability mean manufacturers can’t invest with confidence, and clients can’t point to the evidence base they need to justify the approach. BB:CoP will champion the cross-sector collaboration needed to build this evidence base – project by project, through honest case studies the whole sector can learn from. 

THEME 4
Resident Impact: Focussing on experience and outcomes 

The Challenge: Lack of consistent data on resident experience and outcomes means the human case for industrialised construction remains largely invisible. 

The Opportunity: Deliver homes that demonstrably enable residents to thrive, and place lived experience at the centre of decision making. 

For all the energy spent on the supply side of housing delivery, the person who actually lives in the home is too often an afterthought in how we measure success. The human case for industrialised construction is compelling (warmer homes, healthier environments, stronger communities), but it’s rarely told with the rigour and consistency needed to drive change.

Placing lived experience at the centre of how we design, procure and evaluate homes is both the right thing to do and the most powerful argument we have for doing things differently. We’ll be working to build the evidence, amplify and build in the voices into the process, and make the human case as clearly as we can make the commercial one. 

See yourself as part of the solution? 

These four themes reinforce and depend on each other. You can’t prove value without delivery excellence. You can’t achieve delivery excellence without shifting the narrative. And none of it matters if the people living in the homes aren’t better off as a result. 

BB:CoP is a community of people already working through these challenges. It’s platform to connect, share knowledge, and positively shape the future of the sector. 

It is a learning partnership open to professionals across the social and affordable housing delivery ecosystem. If you recognise these challenges and see yourself as part of the solution, we’d love to have you with us.
Join the Building Better: Community of Practice.