When the Silver Bullet Misses

RORY SUTHERLAND MAKES THE POINT that “the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.” Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) are a case in point.

We advise on MMC most days, but we’re not MMC evangelists. Used in the right context, MMC are a powerful enabler of better outcomes. Applied indiscriminately, they can tie up capital, introduce complexity, and increase, rather than reduce, risk.

In a market that craves silver bullets, binary thinking is tempting, yet rarely accurate. Good intentions, misapplied, have a habit of creating new problems.

And so, as the industry pivots from  MMC to “Industrialised Construction,” certain underlying tensions remain unresolved. Many of the substantive critiques that dogged MMC remain and if the sector evolves without properly reckoning with those concerns, “industrialised construction” will inherit the same credibility gap, just with cleaner branding.

The sceptics are not all right. The claim that construction is “too heterogeneous” for standardisation often conflates product with process. The “off-site vs on-site” framing is increasingly outdated; hybrids are now the norm.

But they’re not all wrong either. Several critiques  deserve proper engagement, not least because they surface tensions underneath the hype.

Tension 1: Policy wants a lever; delivery needs a judgement

In the UK, government enthusiasm for MMC has been hardly subtle. The “presumption in favour” of MMC/off-site, across capital programmes, where it represents value for money, was explicitly signalled as a direction of travel.

That is both a clear steer and an ambiguous one.

This is where Professor Stuart Green’s critique is particularly important. He isn’t anti-modernisation. He’s anti-dogma. His work, particularly Making Sense of Construction Improvement, traces how successive waves of “improvement” in construction have been adopted as articles of faith rather than tested propositions, each promoted through simplistic narratives that flatten structural complexity into managerialist recipes. [1] . MMC arguably fitted that pattern, repeatedly framed as if it were a cure for multiple structural problems at once – productivity, quality, skills, affordability, carbon, programme risk. But those problems have different causes, different feedback loops, and different timescales.

Creating a delivery method as a general remedy risks flattening complexity into ideology.

A more credible stance is pluralistic: using  industrialised approaches where they fit, and avoid turning “method” into “policy”. The question shouldn’t whether MMC/industrialisation is “good” or “bad” but how we avoid treating a tool as a worldview.

 

Tension 2: Industrialisation changes who benefits, and where the risk sits

One of the most important critiques of MMC is not really about panels versus bricks. It’s about distribution of jobs, skills, investment, and vulnerability.

The skills and place paradox

At an extreme MMC has been advocated as a panacea for the construction skills crisis. The counterclaim is that it can displace skills and opportunity, particularly in the communities where projects are delivered.

The reality is that when value-adding activity moves from site to factory, local employment can thin out. Communities that most need opportunity may find themselves watching components arrive from elsewhere, with workforce development happening somewhere else too. That matters because construction’s social value story has long relied on being a route into skilled work for local people.

Concentrated vulnerability is real

Factory employment also carries a different risk profile: it is more concentrated. When a factory fails, the impact is sudden, local and severe, rather than dispersed across multiple sites and firms. Recent UK examples make the point vividly: Ilke Homes (c. 1,150 jobs lost in North Yorkshire) and Legal & General Modular (c. 450 jobs in Sherburn-in-Elmet).

This doesn’t mean factory-based production is “bad”. It means it is politically and socially non-neutral. If industrialisation concentrates manufacturing in a handful of places, the benefits concentrate too …. and so does the downside.

There is a credible upside here: off-site capacity can support regional rebalancing. Our research identified more than 350 UK off-site manufacturers, disproportionately located in former industrial regions of the Midlands and North. But that opportunity sits in tension with local labour expectations (including Section 106 commitments) and the realities of concentrated economic shocks.

International evidence (Sweden and Japan) suggests industrialised construction can support reskilling rather than deskilling where investment and demand are stable. The UK’s stop-start pipelines and policy volatility make that harder. Industrial systems compound capability; volatile markets punish it.

So the real question isn’t “should we industrialise?” It’s: how do we industrialise without creating a new geography of winners and losers?

None of this is a reason to reject factory-based production. But it is a reason to think carefully about where facilities are located, how supply chains are structured, and how workforce strategies balance regional benefit with operational reality.

 

Tension 3: Claims are bold; evidence is thin (and affordability is the easiest own goal)

Even where industrialised methods genuinely improve delivery, the industry often over-claims on outcomes it cannot control.

Efficiency is not affordability

For example, building homes more efficiently does not automatically make housing more affordable. Prices are driven largely by the second-hand market, land values, planning constraints, financing conditions, and the structure of demand, not by marginal shifts in production cost.

Efficiency still matters. But policy and industry comms should stop bundling “faster and better delivery” into “affordability”. Otherwise critics don’t need to be clever, they can just point to house prices.

Carbon needs evidence not bold sales ptich

MMC is often positioned as greener: less waste, tighter tolerances, better quality control. But Richard O’Hegarty and colleagues’ literature synthesis on MMC and embodied carbon concludes the evidence is not clear-cut and is highly context- and system-dependent”[1] .

That critique is fair, and reinforces the need for an evidence based approach. This principle extends wider.

The evidence gap is the strategic problem

Policy and industry advocacy often haven’t built a disciplined habit of measurement: clear objectives, transparent baselines, published results, and iterative learning. Without that, the debate stays ideological and industrialised construction risks becoming another cycle of enthusiasm followed by disillusionment.

 

From MMC to industrialised construction: same risks, new branding?

The shift from MMC to Industrialised Construction reflects an evolution in thinking but also an awkward acknowledgement that “MMC” had become a muddied term, synonymous with volumetric construction..

“Industrialised Construction” better captures what’s actually at stake: the application of manufacturing principles – process control, quality assurance, supply chain integration, continuous improvement – to construction delivery. It’s less about where things are made and more about how production is organised.

But if industrialised construction is promoted with the same evangelical fervour, the same disregard for context, and the same oversimplified claims that characterised MMC advocacy, it will face the same backlash. Sceptics will simply update their critiques.

What would a mature conversation look like?

If the industry wants industrialised construction to succeed where MMC stumbled, three things need to change.

• First, honesty about limitations. Industrialised approaches work well in some contexts and poorly in others. Large scale programmes and portfolios with opportunity to reduce variability offer the best fit. One-off projects may not. Advocates need to be as clear about where industrialised methods don’t make sense as where they do.
• Second, engagement with distributional concerns. If manufacturing concentrates, the skills and employment benefits concentrate too. That needs to be acknowledged and addressed, not with PR, but with industrial strategy: regional capacity planning, supply chain development, and procurement that treats social value as something you architect, not something you “claim”.
• Third: outcomes, not ideology:.If the argument is that industrialised approaches deliver better outcomes – cost certainty, programme reliability, quality, whole-life performance – then measure them, publish them, and iterate. If the industry can’t demonstrate outcomes, it will keep losing credibility regardless of what it calls the approach.

Construction has a long history of embracing panaceas (lean construction, partnering, BIM, MMC – just have a read of this ) each promoted as transformative, each delivering less than promised, each generating unintended consequences that created new problems. The pattern is familiar enough that scepticism is warranted.

Industrialised construction need not follow this path. But avoiding it requires something the industry finds difficult: nuance. The acknowledgment that context matters. That trade-offs exist. That even good ideas can go wrong when applied without discrimination.

We’ll continue to advise on industrialised approaches where they fit. We’ll also continue to say, clearly, where they don’t. The industry deserves better than another cycle of hype and disillusionment. It deserves honest counsel about what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Horses for courses.

[1] Green, S.D. (2024). Making Sense of Construction Improvement.  Routledge https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003308133

[2]O’Hegarty, R., McCarthy, A., O’Hagan, J., Thanapornpakornsin, T., Raffoul, S., & Kinnane, O. (2025). Understanding the embodied carbon credentials of modern methods of construction. Buildings and Cities,