What can the Scottish teach the rest
of us about Sustainable Building?
Everyone knows
that the UK is not building enough new homes.
The reason,
evident to all, is that the banks are only approving mortgages for those who will deposit the eternal soul of their first born child into a sub-prime
structured casino-investment accumulator on the 2.30 at Newmarket. ("A dead-cert mate, can't lose"). Oh, and the small matter of a 20% deposit too.
In a near-perfect example of having your cake and eating it, government exhorts banks to lend more (to get the economy moving), while at the same time regulating that they should increase their reserves (ready for the next banking crash).
It may be obvious to everyone that developers won't build houses if people can't get a mortgage with which to buy them, but the UK government has been insisting that the real problem is "red tape".
As house builders unveil spectacular improvements in profitability, government continues to work to reduce the cost of regulation, arguing that this will increase the supply of new homes. In fact the main effect is of course to make more profitable the houses which would have been built anyway.
It is only recently that initiatives have been announced to try to unfreeze the mortgage market, with programmes such as Newbuy starting to have a real effect on demand for new homes.
So, since this Greenest Government Ever came in, we’ve
seen it systematically water down regulations intended to ensure that new homes are built to high environmental standards:
- a dilution of the definition of what constitutes a ‘Zero Carbon Home’,
- cancelling a planned increase in the environmental standards for new social housing
- delays to new Building Regulations that would have tightened up on energy efficiency
- a Housing Standards Review to “simplify the mass of rules imposed on house builders.”
This last
initiative, under the banner of "the bonfire of the red tape", is (among other things) examining a practice where local authorities require developers in their region to achieve energy performance standards in new buildings that exceed
the current Building Regulations. For
example some local authorities require a certain level of the Code for
Sustainable Homes (CSH) or a percentage of the energy used in the buildings to
be provided from renewable energy technologies.
Developers
dislike these local requirements, because means they have to customize house
designs for each area in which they operate.
There is a lack of consistency between Local Authorities, each of which
have dreamt up their own requirements – 10% renewable energy, 10% CO2
emissions reduction, CSH level 4 and so on.
It’s worth at
this point reflecting on the fact that the Building Regulations are not some sort
of gold standard of quality. They represent a minimum requirement, a baseline, an adequate product. There’s nothing wrong with local authorities
choosing to require higher levels of sustainable construction and energy
efficiency in their area.
This government
has repeatedly spoken about the importance local people deciding how they want
to run things in their area. Can a
compromise be found which allows local decision making while at the same time
simplifying things for developers?
Well, as it
happens, you don’t have to look very far for the answer. North of the border, the Scottish government
seems to have pulled it off.
Scotland's Miles Better
The Scottish
Building Regulations 2011 introduced a new section – Section 7, Sustainability.
New homes in
Scotland are categorised from Bronze Sustainability to Platinum Sustainability, moving from current building regulations at Bronze and adding tougher and tougher requirements for energy use and a host of other measures such as water consumption, sound proofing, and the provision of space for a home office, recycling bins and wheelchair or baby buggy. The table above shows how the standards develop for the energy requirements.
The energy requirements display an encouragingly sensible focus on lowering the demand for heat (which must be generated locally) in preference to generating low carbon electricity (which can be done anywhere).
This system “encourages consistency between planning
authorities that use supplementary guidance to promote higher measures of
sustainable construction in their area.”
By creating a set of clear national benchmarks, local areas can choose
what they want, but from a limited menu, greatly simplifying things for
developers. By linking the standards to
the Building Regulations, they are given primacy.
Westminster
shouldn’t be too proud to adopt this ready-made solution to the problem of how to give choice to local areas without the proliferation of similar, but slightly different standards.