Prefab housing plants to reduce foreign manpower: Khaw

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In National Development Minister Khaw Boon Wan’s latest blog entry, he highlights the need for more foreign construction workers to build the planned 25,000 BTO flats for this year. In addition to the earlier BTO projects which are still in progress, an estimated 30,000 construction workers, mostly foreigners, are required.

Of course, the matter of housing the workers has arisen, but finding suitable dormitories (especially far away from residential areas, as Singaporeans would prefer) has proven difficult.

As a possible solution, Mr Khaw has proposed increased productivity by way of standardisation and pre-fabrication for basic housing facilities such as walls, floors, doors, toilets and rubbish chutes, which can be “manufactured off-site in bulk, in prefab factories…making construction sites cleaner, tidier, less dusty and less noisy.”

He added that “Off-site conditions are mostly better controlled, allowing productivity measures and quality checks to be carried out more effectively.”

However, he also pointed out that the prefab plants must be “transformed”, citing the Netherland’s and Germany’s highly computerised and automated multi-storey precast plants as examples to follow. He mentioned multi-storey Integrated Construction and Precast Hubs (ICPHs) in particular, which need “only a third of the workers almost double the tonnage of precast components”.

Currently, Tiong Seng Contractors is pioneering this improvement by establishing Singapore’s first ICPH at Tuas, which will utilise computerisation and semi-automated precasting. In so doing, their manpower needs are expected to be reduced by up to 70 percent, from 150 to 50 workers per plant.

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