Public Funding for QM Systems Limited

Most people think of fuel poverty as simply not being able to afford to keep your home warm. The official definition is; a household is said to be fuel poor if it has above-average energy costs, and if paying those costs would push it below the poverty line as far as its remaining income was concerned. One of the key factors that can contribute to fuel poverty is that the poor energy efficiency of the property (and therefore, the energy required to heat and power the home). This can be due to a lack of insulation (walls and roofs), draughts, poor ventilation, dampness or inefficient heating systems. Local Authorities in the South East of England generally have below average fuel poverty levels, while households in the North West, London and the West Midlands generally have the highest levels of fuel poverty. (Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy -- Fuel Poverty Supplementary Tables 2020) The West Midlands elected mayor has an ambition to aggregate local authority social housing stock to tackle 50,000 homes by 2024\. DOORWAY is part of an innovative social house retrofit program that tackles both Fuel Poverty and emissions without the need for government subsidiary. This is achieved by a proportion of the energy savings achieved paying off the capital costs, regenerating some of Britain's most deprived areas, all funded by global green social finance to 'Build Back Better'. To ensure a creation of a new supply chain to meet this challenge Midlands High Growth has its own Exemplar factory and Skills Village ensuring other manufacturers can license their own DOORWAY automation lines or 'pop up factory' with full turn key support to create UK high value jobs, DOORWAY is a key breakthrough combination of products, attractive to owner/occupiers/private and social landlords, reducing fuel poverty whilst driving widespread new designed for 'COVID' safe employment opportunities aiding both economic recovery and reducing any future pandemic. Each house will have a 'building passport' created that ensures the DOORWAY solution will be compatible with other retrofit technologies to ensure that Net Zero carbon emissions can be reached by 2040\. One of the major challenges with a deep house retrofit is the length of time an occupant may have to vacate the property whilst the roof is taken off and replaced or while the walls are being re-bricked. The DOORWAY system will significantly reduce the disruption to the occupant with the roof being in place and water-tight within the same day and the walls lifted into place within two days. At the same time this also reduces the number of vans and lorries needed to attend site and the amount of rubbish that inevitably traditional methods create. DOORWAY will create highly efficient insulated and easy to install a Roof and an External Wall Insulations system that can be produced in volume off site, within a high-quality controlled environment that aligns to the governments Construction Innovation Hub standardised platform approach and aims to be 50% cheaper then equivalent market solutions.

"Construction practice has hardly evolved in 40 years, and nor has productivity. Houses as a product have been criticised as cost-inefficient and failing to meet the market demand. Innovation market failures have been caused by 1) lack of continuity of business cycles, 2) presence of discipline silos, 3) lack of evidence-based benchmarks for modern construction methods and 4) fragmented available knowledge. The proposed project - to be led by the commercial arm of Walsall Housing Group and delivered by a consortium of experts from various sectors and disciplines - attempts to address these issues by adopting an innovative cross-disciplinary collaborative approach to design, manufacture and assemble market-proof, environmentally-friendly and scalable affordable houses to meet demand. **The collaboration includes 1) development of know-how for i) design for manufacture; ii) design for assembly; iii) design for high performance and low impact and iv) design for houses with minimal life cycle costs and CO2 emissions (i.e. DfMA houses); 2) evaluation of automation potential of design for manufacture; 3) development of evidence-based production and life-cycle benchmarks for DfMA houses; and 4) development of knowledge-based engineering tools to estimate life-cycle costs and carbon emissions**. DfMA houses proposed in the project will directly contribute to reducing 33% life-cycle costs including 10% build cost, 50% design and construction time, 30% household energy consumption and 50% carbon intensity, and increasing 20% construction productivity. This will **impact and expand the Group's 1,365 house delivery programme by 2021, as well as regional and national programmes**. The anticipated economic benefits for the project include: 1) reducing tenant householders' energy bills; 2) creating new business opportunity for suppliers; 3) reducing regional construction costs and speeding up delivery to meet the completions targeted; 4) allowing other registered providers to replicate the business model through partnerships with the Group, which will create a multiplier effect; 5) a reduced labour requirement per home will improve the industry resilience to labour shortage -- an existing problem likely to worsen over time. Other social impacts include: 1) improving quality of life by creating more disposable income and more comfortable living environment; 2) quicker access to social or affordable housing; 3) creating new roles and skills for the future; 4) creating a safer work environment for production than the traditional production onsite."

WiTNESSS (WIreless Technologies for Novel Enhancement of Systems and Structures Serviceability) is a collaborative project which will research and de-risk wireless data transmission technology for key testing and structural health monitoring applications in aero engines, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. A consortium of key players from the UK aerospace industry, led by TRW Conekt, is to develop wireless data gathering and transmission technology for aircraft applications – with an investment of £1.6m from the Technology Strategy Board.