Off-site construction specialist, the Portakabin Group, has been appointed to the Southern Modular Building Framework — a new framework which has been launched to facilitate the procurement of modular buildings for public sector projects across London, the South-east and South-west.
Operated by Hampshire County Council, this new initiative aims to minimise procurement time and generate cost savings by reducing costly and resource-intensive competitive tendering. It offers public sector clients a full turnkey service for modular projects, from design to handover, including building manufacture, installation, fitting out, testing and commissioning.
The appointment of Portakabin to the framework is for projects in excess of £100,000 through to multi-million pound schemes, requiring a design life of more than 60 years.
The accreditation follows an independent assessment of Yorkon off-site solutions and services from the Portakabin Group, as well as performance for on time and on budget delivery, customer service, quality management procedures, and regulatory compliance.
Mark Thomas, framework manager at Hampshire County Council, commented: “Our aim is to promote and encourage collaborative working to improve the design, procurement and construction of public sector projects across the South East. Our experience has shown that choosing a modular approach can offer significant benefits over site-based building methods — better quality, rapid delivery, and cost certainty — by moving the construction process into a carefully-controlled factory environment.”
Applications for permanent modular buildings that can be procured through the framework include education facilities, healthcare schemes, offices, and community buildings. Organisations making use of the scheme could include local authorities, universities, fire and rescue services, charities, healthcare providers, schools and academies, colleges and doctor’s surgeries.
Portakabin is a supplier of off-site building solutions across the public sector. Among its recent contracts are:
- The successful completion of the £9m first phase of a £44m school campus for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, which will be the UK’s largest free school campus.
- A £2m, four-storey scheme for office support staff at the University Hospital Southampton, built in less than five months on a highly constrained site
- A state-of-the-art laboratory scheme at the University of Cumbria — the second project delivered by Portakabin at the Fusehill Campus in Carlisle.
Modular buildings are designed to be rapidly installed in enclosed courtyards, on the roofs of existing buildings and on steel platforms to help public and private sector clients increase capacity and optimise their use of space.
