Home Building Standards

Most home building standards are controlled and regulated by central government through Planning and the Building Regulations. Every year the home building standards are forever being adjusted and improved at various levels for better efficiency and design of a home.

Most of the technical performance standards for a new home comes under the control of the Building Regulations rather than at the first stage of Planning.  However, part of the Planning remit is to now require some form of statement or proof that the proposed property will provide a certain level of efficiency for their 'sustainable homes' policy.

Unfortunately, as the Government seeks to continually interfere with the Planning Process and rather than leaving the home building standards under the control of the Building Regulations where experienced teams are already employed and on hand to assess and impose such technical details, the Planners are also being burdened with trying to impose higher and more technical details at the Planning stages for which most are un-prepared.

This simply creates a higher front end cost for the applicant or site owner wishing to develop a site for new homes and as many schemes are refused at Planning, the potential abortive costs are now quite substantial which is reducing the amount of sites being proposed for fear of these excessive costs for a host of reports and studies demanded by the Planning Department that really are quite unnecessary at the Planning Stages of a properties design proposal.

NOTE - These are general discussion articles only.