Legal & General set to create over 400 jobs in Leeds.
Legal & General Capital (LGC) has today announced the launch of its modular housing business, Legal & General Homes, which will seek to modernise the home building industry by providing modern, precision engineered factory manufactured houses through its new factory in the North of England.
The UK's housing supply is in crisis. This is a chronic production problem; we simply don't supply enough houses to meet the demand by customers, both young and old. The UK has an annual output of around 130,000 homes, with a requirement for 250,000. Legal & General is aiming to build thousands of modular houses to help tackle this long term problem.
Legal & General Homes has signed a long-term lease with Logicor on a 550,000 sq ft warehouse in Sherburn-in-Elmet, 15 miles east of Leeds, representing the largest modular homes construction factory in the world. Initially employing 400 to 500 local people, it expects to deliver its first houses from the factory in June. The customer response to our modular housing has been extremely positive from a wide range of developers.
Paul Stanworth, Managing Director of Legal & General Capital, said: "Sustainable, durable modern materials and proven technology will enable us to create high-quality homes meeting a wide range of housing needs and help solve the UK's housing crisis. Modern modular housing in the UK has so far been restricted to the top end of the market: the scale of our Sherburn facility will enable many more people to benefit from new, environmentally-friendly construction techniques which have already become mainstream in Europe."
A flexible, cost-effective solution, it will produce high quality homes tailored to meet customers' designs and needs, ranging from 20-storey apartment blocks to rows of terraced, semi-detached and detached houses. The technology has been proven right across Europe, including countries such as Austria, Germany and Scandinavia where off-site manufacturing of housing is increasingly common place. Time spent building on site will be reduced by more than 70%, compared to traditional techniques, manufacturing sections in advance and delivering them to the site to be installed.