The Housing Standards Review Consultation was released by DCLG earlier today, seeking views as to how to rationalise the framework of Building Regulations and local housing standards.
Put simply, the Government is seeking to wind down the Code for Sustainable Homes and curtail the ability of planning authorities to seek levels performance above and beyond Building Regulations and / or any other Central Government-endorsed standard.
Most house-builders will likely welcome moves to reduce and simplify planning requirements; however, to assess the significance of these proposals it is helpful to examine the context within which sustainability is normally discussed to highlight how changes might come about:
· Strategic issues, such as the sustainability of the type of development at the proposed location, are largely excluded from the Consultation and therefore will likely remain part of the planning remit;
· Masterplan issues, such the site layout, orientation, scale and interrelationship of the proposed development with infrastructure and surroundings, are recommended as remaining, by-and-large, a planning concern;
· Design issues, where they relate to the internal function of the building (e.g. energy use & carbon emissions, water consumption) will - in the main - be captured by the Building Regulations and / or any other endorsed standard;
· Construction issues, such as waste generation and materials consumption, are either omitted from the Consultation or, in the case of materials, not deemed to have a sufficiently compelling case for local authority standard setting.
Superficially, the above might appear to represent a shift as to where sustainability is addressed within the development programme. However, that would be to ignore the following:
a) The National Planning Policy Framework requires authorities to consider sustainable design;
b) There is an interrelationship between the building design and the masterplan (i.e. the masterplan can impact the building design and vice-versa);
c) The authorities never owned the Code and many planning policies were converging on a “Level 4” target. Transferring these requirements to the Building Regulations may simply change the point of reference;
d) The Building Regulations are not static and will likely link to strategic and masterplan issues (e.g. “Allowable Solutions”);
e) The Housing Standards Review is for housing only. It excludes non-domestic development.
It might therefore be logical for authorities to continue requiring detail as to how schemes intend to address sustainability in all contexts; irrespective as to whether they have any influence over the design targets. Therefore, rather than pushing the subject further down the development programme, it may actually pull consideration of engineering issues to the fore.
Nevertheless, the principle of the proposals should be viewed as developer-friendly, and should remove some of the unnecessary duplicity and bureaucracy that have frustrated the sector in recent years.