YORhub: Firstly, many congratulations on your PhD Doctor Saad, from all of us at YORhub. How does it feel to have finally completed the journey?

Dr.Ali Saad: Thank you so much. It was a fascinating journey, thanks to YORhub. I’ve enjoyed YORhub’s help and supervision for the past three years during my PhD, not only financially, but also with unconditional support. That’s maybe more important than the funding itself – access to their knowledge and expertise, access to their contacts, their network and the multi-million-pound projects they delivered and are delivering. I want to say a big thank you to all the YORhub team for their significant contribution to my journey since 2020, and their continued support in my new endeavour.

YORhub: How else did YORhub assist you through your PhD journey?

Ali: The support that YORhub provided was imperative here. I was very lucky to be supervised by highly distinguished academic leaders, such as Professor Mohammed Dulaimi, Professor Chris Gorse, and Professor Sam Zulu. The learning culture that Professor Dulaimi pioneered directly influenced my work and therefore the multiple meaningful and impactful outputs that followed. However, such outputs wouldn’t have been made possible purely by the traditional way of doing a PhD alone, where one would lack a strong link and insight from practice. YORhub allowed me to have this link, not only by advising on the project’s robustness, but also the usability and benefit of the project by the industry. YORhub’s key connections with industry and government gave me the eagle-eye view that enabled me to objectively collect data which I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. Plus, me being based in Leeds was timely and highly beneficial, as the region itself was attractive to major investments in MMC, so we had some of the leading organisations across the UK in the area. This meant we could monitor and visit MMC factories and sites.

YORhub: What made you choose MMC as your research subject?

Ali: I am very ambitious to understand change in the sector, and it happens that MMC is the closest methodology to a fundamental change since the building of the pyramids. Researching MMC enabled me to contemplate this vision, to advocate for change away from innovation-negativism, but doing so sensibly, objectively, and safely.

YORhub: What were the milestones and highlights of your journey?

I was lucky that MMC is a hot topic, which meant that the relative challenges have long been felt and acknowledged by the government and industry, so it was timely to conduct this research investigating MMC – particularly when we’ve seen the increasing interest and the downfall of some of the leading MMC providers. It was exciting to explore the methods that will allow us to deliver places differently, and innovatively. But also, to understand the reasons for failure and business performance, which is often hindered by the transition, and as a consequence of advocating pre-manufactured value from its auxiliary perceived role, to actually being a core requirement in order to meet demand. That’s highly needed in delivering infrastructure, especially with housing.

YORhub: Were there any particular challenges, or occasions where you couldn’t get what you needed for your research?

Ali:  Yes, I think it was sometimes based around that the nature of the construction community here in the UK. We have a lot of opposing views and opposing perspectives, but we also have an issue with communication. We don’t have the transparency that will allow someone to easily gain an objective opinion, particularly when it comes to the public construction sector and I don’t think we are doing enough to correct this problem. So that was a challenge, to get this communication going and understand why we are not speaking with each other.

YORhub:  Is that that mostly down to competition, intellectual property or is it just the culture of the industry generally?

Ali: I think there are a number of factors. Firstly, there’s a kind of fear that successes should be advertised, but failures should be discarded from communication because of potential business and political aspects. Secondly, there is a kind of cultural influence. The construction sector strives for a competitive advantage and if someone manages to create successful differentiation they believe to offer a competitive edge, they are reluctant to share what’s working and what’s not working. And whilst that’s understandable, it is a challenge as well – particularly for MMC – in that we’re holding back knowledge sharing across the sector and therefore limiting the adoption of innovations.

YORhub: You previously mentioned negativism. What is driving such negativism in MMC in the UK public sector?

Ali: It’s more than just the post-world war failures of MMC in contributing to the formation of innovation-negativism, as I call it. We cannot ignore the history of MMC from 80-years ago that has led to a bad reputation and a bitter opinion that is very difficult to eradicate. Yet, this is only one of many other contributors to such negativism. This is why we have produced the policy practice paper and entitled it: ‘Confidence amidst collapse’ in an effort to discuss the issues in detail and improve confidence.

YORhub: The commitment to build 1.5 million homes from the Government has been broadly welcomed, but it has been pointed out that the UK has only achieved this scale of housebuilding in the past when local authorities were heavily involved. What are the challenges for public sector procurement with regards to MMC?

Ali: It’s a substantial number at around 370,000 per year. When we have these statistics in front of us, we can see the UK does not offer the business environment to deliver homes in the numbers that are required. Putting these ambitious numbers against supply’s capabilities, it becomes clear that the UK is not a place for housebuilding. The public construction sector isn’t a transparent social system. There is often no obligation for the relative organisations to communicate with and support each other. When it comes to their MMC experiences, what they do, how they do it, their successes and failures are all largely kept within their institutional memories. The lack of solid ties between these organisations means that knowledge is pursued in silos, where lessons learnt become a lengthy and continuous cycle of duplicated trials and errors. All of this, unfortunately, suggests that radically changing project delivery through pre-manufactured value is unlikely to become mainstream until a common transparent environment for knowledge is sustained and social, political, and cultural barriers discarded. knowledge sharing is critical and a key factor towards broadly adopting innovations.

YORhub: Do you think the Government’s target of 1.5m homes is realistic and what are the prospects of achieving that kind of number without MMC?

Ali: I would see it as impossible because we’ve tried that, and the sector is still far behind. We’ve tried to do things in a better and faster way traditionally, and we’ve managed to increase housing quality, but not the numbers of homes required to satisfy demand. We need to be innovative and create a business environment that will allow us to unlock these innovations. We need champions of change. Because currently we have a business environment that punishes those who are innovating.

YORhub: You mentioned MMC businesses failing, sometimes in the middle of active projects. Anna Clarke, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the Housing Forum said recently “I have just come out of a meeting yesterday looking at councils’ use of MMC and what the barriers were. To be fair, they had a pretty negative view. Almost all the council development people around the table had tried it and were not going to do it again. They said, ‘We have been bitten. We are not doing that again’”. What needs to be done to change that outlook?

Ali: This is something that councils struggle with. Especially if there’s an organisation that runs into financial difficulties, leaving a project uncompleted. This is public money and now who can take that project on and complete it? But we cannot judge all MMC projects as associated with failure because it’s unfair. We need to dissect exactly what happened. There are a lot of good projects with processes that worked. The narrative where such comparisons occur is often created to place MMC as an exaggerated way of delivering places with very little to offer in competition with a traditional approach. This nurtures the perception that MMC is ‘more expensive’, ‘risky’, and unsuitable. The aim of such attempts is to position pre-manufactured value as ill-defined and unnecessary. It is a confidence issue and again one of the reasons for the publication of the policy practice paper.

YORhub: There are thousands of construction businesses that go to the wall every year. Do you think MMC failures receive more scrutiny and headlines in the press?

Ali: I think it sells better in the news. It supports the notion that change is bad, innovating is bad, and therefore anything that’s modern, different or non-traditional is associated with failure. The construction sector is a complex environment, where even traditional construction organisations can struggle to operate and be successful. But it becomes even more complicated for organisations who are delivering things differently and they are punished for this.

YORhub: We see a lot of debates around the cost of MMC being more or less expensive than traditional build. Is this just a question of skewed data, negativity or economies of scale?

Ali: My research identified multiple influencing factors among both clients and MMC organisations and conceptualised the formation of negativism in the public sector. None of these factors related to cost. The construction industry has, historically, a complex social function and is the foremost predictor of the successful diffusion of innovations. This function is misinformed about MMC, not about the values and advantages per se, but about how these values can meet what is critically needed as a priority and respond to the industry’s shortcomings.

YORhub: The report by the House of Lords Built Environment Committee, chaired by Lord Moylan, criticised the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities for being unable to provide any document outlining their approach to MMC and concluded “The Government needs to change tack. Simply throwing money at the sector hasn’t worked. If it wants to encourage MMC, it must acquire a much deeper understanding of how it works, develop a clear strategy, and demonstrate leadership.”

Do you agree that the Government has lacked a strategy and do you think there’s enough Government support?

Ali: I would like to thank Lord Moylan for brilliantly leading this effort and everyone involved. I think the government had a strategy, but I don’t think that the policymaking alone was enough. There is a difference between us encouraging innovation by a presumption in favour, and us allowing the circumstances for innovation to occur. We have the policies in place now, whether these can be governed within the traditionally accepted system, that’s a different story. The questions asked by the Committee are key questions and the answers that we received from the leaders of the industry tell us that we need to act on resolving a lot of things, and the only way we can do that is through research – through fundamental, clear, transparent research to tackle all these kinds of challenges.

YORhub: The report also criticised the Government for not publishing data on MMC usage, despite promising to do so in 2019. Is there a general lack of hard data on MMC?

Ali: We do have a lot of data on MMC, but I think this is scattered and disjointed and we need to work together with MMC organisations and both public and private sectors and build a nationwide resource of credible evidence with exemplars and evidence of success and failures. So perhaps a policy could take place, as I mentioned in my policy practice paper, to govern the functions of this resource and include all these lessons learned. This is not only a government role, but everyone’s responsibility to take part.

YORhub: Do you think further legislation is the way forward? Should the Government set a mandate that a particular percentage of all new homes must be built using MMC, for example?

Ali: I would say that’s a good start, but we need to look at the traditional construction model which includes a lot of dynamic aspects that cause issues – the easiest example would be planning. Traditional contractors are more than happy to wait for planning, they have much greater flexibility to respond to planning decisions.  A factory needs to operate with a manufacturing mindset. We need to have fast track planning for innovation that will allow planning decision makers to look at an MMC proposal, understand that this is something that is repeatable, possibly also similar to what has been delivered before – the same replicated solution – and provide a swift planning decision. We cannot expect organisations to unlock the benefits of a factory manufacturing production system and continue to innovate within the traditional construction model because they simply can’t.

YORhub: You mention in your policy paper standardising systems among MMC providers to ensure ease of handover in the event of organisational failure, how does the industry make that happen when some businesses may have invested decades of development in their intellectual property?

Ali: IP is one thing, but not speaking with other organisations is another. We can’t promote confidence if every single organisation operates this way. We have a number of examples, especially in our region where we have sites 50% completed and then demolished due to insolvency, because it wasn’t feasible to take the project over and complete it. It’s not sustainable to have this IP, hide it from the world and expect the industry to thrive and in this new reality of innovations you must be similar to other systems that exist. The success of a project should not be dependent on your existence as an organisation.

YORhub: Do warranty and insurance providers need to step up to reduce the extensive time periods it can take to obtain warranties and to accept compliance with building regulations as sufficient data for approval? Should the Government set out this expectation clearly to the sector?

Ali: I think we do have that. There are warranties that can guarantee any MMC solution up to 60-70 years, same as what is expected in traditional built. Obtaining an MMC home should not be too dissimilar from obtaining a traditional home. We are not bringing these materials from Mars. We are just changing the way we are efficiently using these materials to deliver homes.

YORhub: You mention ‘synergy’ as one of the recommendations in your policy practice paper. Is this a case of integrating new technologies, education and skills development between project phases?

Ali: Yes, and integration within the different phases of an MMC project. It’s those main differences between an MMC project and a traditional project. Communication differs when one comes to MMC. There has to be better communication between the manufacturing phase and the construction phase. It’s still a construction project and therefore it still relies on doing certain things traditionally. We need to view a project as not either MMC or traditional construction, but actually MMC and traditional construction together, as a must, which then needs to be viewed as a superior to traditional alone. So we need to embrace that and we need to allow design, manufacturing, production, transportation, construction and assembly to synergise.

YORhub: If we consider all the construction areas that local authorities could benefit from implementing MMC, not just housing, but offices, civic buildings and schools. There appear to be so many advantages – ranging from better control of quality, reduction in waste, sustainability, a safer construction process and reduced time on site. Do you think we’ll see a change in attitude to MMC in the foreseeable future?

Ali: I feel how things are going for the non-domestic developments compared to that of domestic ones are extremely good news to MMC. A lot of exemplars exist to support this claim. We can look at the successes by the MMC frameworks by the Department for Education, and the KPIs that have been used. This also applies to the work by the Ministry of Justice in their New Prisons Programme Delivery Plan through MMC. The NHS has also published its assessment tool user guide published this January 2025. So when we see the right conditions are being set and the expectations are carefully measured, the construction methodology will yield favourable outcomes, and vice versa. This is irrespective of MMC or traditional, unlike what is often advertised.

YORhub; Finally, you’re now a full-time Lecturer in Construction Engineering and Project Management at Loughborough University. Did you always intend to work in education, or has it been a gradual transition for you?

Ali: I think this transition towards education is kind of sustaining the ability to have a meaningful impact and I think it’s easier to do this from a top-ranked prestigious university. It’s a great place to work and the connections that I’ve gained because of YORhub will serve me very well in continuing to promote change and innovation. We’ve seen fascinating organisations go into liquidation, so part of my research is now focusing on understanding what went wrong, so I am in regular discussions with innovative people with fascinating mindsets. From this role I welcome working with industry, exploring how organisations can effectively adopt innovations which include pre-manufactured value, and digital transformation, so I am now continuing these conversations and conducting research to get to a place where we can pioneer this much needed change to make the organisations within the UK more receptive to change.

You can read Dr Ali Saad’s Policy Practice Paper here

Views and arguments expressed within the above article are not necessarily shared by YORhub, Loughborough University, or Leeds Beckett University.