New rôles and development rules for housing associations: rhe rise of design and build?

This paper summarises an initial report carried out by the Housing Business Research Group, of the University of Reading into Design and Build procurement and a number of research projects undertaken by the national federation of Housing Associations (NFHA), into their members' development programmes. The paper collates existing statistics from these sources and examines the way in which Design and Build procurement can be adapted for the provision of social housing. The paper comments on these changes and questions how risk averting the adopted strategies are in relation to long term housing business management issues arising from the quality of the product produced by the new system.