As part of ongoing work to improve military housing, Operations Director for Accommodation, Sebastian O’Hara, along with VIVO representatives visited newly refurbished homes in Pirbright, showcasing and exploring the future of what military housing could look like.
This follows DIO’s first Research and Development event earlier this year where businesses of all shapes and sizes displayed their innovative products that could make a positive difference to the lives of Service families.
Six homes in Pirbright have been refurbished utilising some of this technology and are designed to test new technologies and improvements to help homes become more modern, comfortable and sustainable.
Each home features a different combination of technologies and enhancements to help understand what benefits they offer to Service families. These include solar panels, battery storage systems, electric heated skirting boards, innovative hot water solutions and a Zero Emission Boiler (ZEB). One of the homes has also been fitted with a fully insulated garden office pod, creating additional flexible living space that can used as a home office, playroom or even extra storage.
By trialling different technologies and approaches in real family homes, valuable insights and statistics can be gathered into how proposed improvements perform in everyday life. Feedback from families living in these pilot homes will help identify which changes deliver the greatest benefits, ensuring future investment is focused on improvements that make the biggest difference to the daily lives of Service personnel and families.
Additionally, specialist 3D scanning technology is being used to create digital versions of military homes to store property information in one central system. Over the course of the two-year trial, around 2,000 homes will be scanned and digitised, which will help to plan repairs and upgrades more efficiently and keep more accurate records of each property over its lifetime. It will also mean that some inspections can be carried out remotely, reducing unnecessary home visits for busy Service families.
These works form part of the wider Defence Housing Strategy, backed by a £9.2 billion investment and delivering the most significant transformation of UK military in more than 50 years. Through the modernisation, refurbishment and rebuilding of over 40,000 homes, the programme is creating better homes for Service families, using real experiences from the pilot homes to deliver meaningful future improvements for families across the Defence estate.
Sebastian O’Hara, DIO’s Operations Director for Accommodation, said:
“Service families deserve homes that are warm, safe and fit for modern living. This pilot is the first of its kind for military housing giving us the opportunity to test new technologies in real homes and understand directly from families what makes the biggest difference to their day-to-day lives. The feedback we get from our families will be used to inform investment decisions, shape the future of military housing and ensure we focus on solutions delivering better outcomes for families. This is about learning what works, listening to our customers and building a better housing service for the future. Through the new Defence Housing Service, we’re driving change across military housing, delivering better homes, raising service standards and putting the needs of Service personnel and their families at the heart of everything we do.”