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Thousands of homes will not conform to new energy standards |
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9 Nov 2010, 1:43 PM
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It has emerged this week that a total of 178,400 homes were pre-registered with Building Control before the introduction of 2010 Part L at the beginning of October. All these homes will be built to lower energy standards than those set out in the updated Building Regulations. The outgoing president of Local Authority Building Control, Andy Hardy, has warned that there will still be new homes being built to 2006 energy efficiency standards as late as 2013 or 2014 as a result of relaxed transition rules for the introduction of greener Building Regulations.
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The situation has arisen as a result of government guidance issued in May over transitional arrangements for revisions to Part G, which abandoned the old approach to commencement of work being plot specific and allowed exemptions to apply to the whole site. This meant that builders needed to start work only on a single unit ahead of the new regulation deadline to allow the whole development to be built to the previous standard.
Making matters worse, the National House Building Council (NHBC) deliberately invited builders and consultants to pre-register schemes ahead of the 1 October threshold for Part L changes to gain an effective 12-month exemption. Serving an Initial Notice, which could be prepared by NHBC Building Control, put back the date by which works had to commence on site till 1 October 2011, according to the NHBC's guide to transition arrangements.
Consequently, local authorities received thousands of applications to pre-register building plots ahead of the deadline, which sees changes to Parts F and J as well as Part L's improved energy and air tightness standards.
The LABC is unhappy with this 'artificial delay' and Hardy made a call for a return to the former regime in his outgoing speech earlier this month. 'The previous commencement of work rule allowing individual units to continue under existing standards was fair. But now developers have been being encouraged to pre-register whole sites that will be carried out in different phases for years to come… Purchasers won't understand why, commentators won't understand why, and we don't understand why,' he said.
Source: RIBA Practice Bulletin No 564
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