Chandler warns Australia’s prefab push is outrunning its assurance systems

David Chandler says Australia needs to look beyond the factory floor if prefabrication is to deliver the productivity and quality gains now being sought by governments.

Chandler, Principal of CE Advisory, where he specialises in housing delivery and industry capability building, is also the former NSW Building Commissioner and has spent decades working across construction reform and industry delivery.

In an extended interview with Built Offsite’s publisher Michael Dolphin, Chandler rejected any suggestion that he is opposed to prefab or modern methods of construction. His concern is that attention remains heavily focused on manufacturing while responsibility becomes less clear once the building leaves the factory.

“No, not at all,” Chandler said when asked whether he opposed prefab.

“My main concern is that we have an end-to-end understanding of what it’s got to be at the end of the day, Michael. Because if prefab loses the trust of the public at any part of its journey from here on in, it’s going to be very hard to retrace that and win back public confidence.”

That concern sits behind Chandler’s description of the emerging sector as a “minefield of unexploded ordnance.”

For Chandler, the risks can exist across the entire chain — from materials entering a factory through transport and installation to the completed building.

“What I’m seeing is that offsite hasn’t really quite embraced the fact that it doesn’t stop at the factory gate,” he said.

“The industry is really not understanding of how do you ingest offsite into onsite, and it’s a very, very immature space.”

He pointed to projects where apparently basic requirements including waterproofing and termite protection had been overlooked during installation.

“I’m just concerned that nobody owns the whole,” Chandler said.

That question becomes more serious where responsibility is divided between manufacturers, builders and installers, particularly if some businesses are no longer operating when defects emerge several years later.

Assurance starts before manufacture
Chandler said compliance cannot simply be checked at the end of production.

During visits to offsite manufacturing facilities, he said he had encountered businesses unable to demonstrate a complete evidence trail establishing the origin and compliance of materials incorporated into their buildings.

“You’ve got to start that journey of assurance the moment you put the stuff together,” he said.

His argument extends beyond technical compliance.

Chandler said government procurement can become so dominated by established procedures that the process itself overtakes the intended building outcome.

“Suddenly you have the process takes predominance over the objective,” he said.

He also questioned whether sufficient construction and manufacturing expertise sits inside the government teams commissioning emerging building systems.

The consequences can extend directly into industry participation.

Chandler cited one designer that spent more than $5 million bidding for a NSW schools program, recovered about $1 million and subsequently decided it would not participate in a similar process again.

“They wear the market out,” Chandler said.

His point is that procurement does not merely risk producing a poor tender outcome. If participation becomes too costly and uncertain, governments can progressively discourage capable manufacturers, designers and contractors from bidding at all.

For Chandler, greater use of prefab therefore needs to be accompanied by harder measures of whether construction performance is actually improving.

By 2030, he wants projects compared against conventional construction using three measures: time from conception to key, the number of people required onsite and the amount of onsite-generated construction waste.

His targets are a 40% reduction in delivery time, 40% reduction in onsite workforce and more than 60% reduction in onsite construction waste.

Rather than separating prefab from the rest of construction, Chandler believes those measures should apply across conventional, hybrid and highly offsite delivery.

“We’ve got to raise all the boats, Michael,” he said.

Ultimately, his test for prefab is not how quickly a module moves through a factory. It is whether the resulting building becomes trustworthy real property — capable of being occupied, insured, financed, sold and relied upon by its owner.

For Chandler, that is where claims about modern construction have to become measurable performance.