Liberal Democrat Don Foster, the communities minister, recently announced:
‘I want to see a simpler set of housing standards that people can easily understand and that free up developers and councils to get on with the job of building the high quality new homes we so badly need to get more first time buyers and families onto the housing ladder.’
This suggests that there is a housing crisis and the building industry is in recession because:
- houses have to be built to a certain standard (impliedly too high a standard);
- developers fail to build houses because they do not understand the standards;
- the existence of these standards has prevented councils building practically any houses since the 1980s;
and not because the financial system has collapsed or because the coalition has reduced capital investment by tens of billions of pounds.
Foster’s statement was part of the ‘Housing and Construction Red Tape Challenge’, which is a CLG initiative rather than a new low on daytime TV. The CLG is ‘reviewing’ certain standards, having misleadingly suggested that these standards are both compulsory and unnecessarily restrictive. The standards targeted by CLG include:
- Secured by Design, which promotes security measures, mostly on housing estates;
- Code for Sustainable Homes, which sets benchmarks for environmental standards beyond the statutory minimum; and
- Housing Quality Indicators, which are used to assess schemes that may qualify for Homes and Communities Agency funding.
Compliance with some of these schemes may be a condition of local authority planning departments, or of funding; they are not compulsory otherwise. Unless CLG decides to restrict local authorities’ control over development, it will be unable to prevent funders or local authorities continuing to impose such standards where they think it appropriate. The only alternative will be reforming (ie cutting) the compulsory regulations.
The only nationally applied compulsory building standards are the Building Regulations. When these were introduced in 1965, they were exclusively concerned with the health and safety of building users, but their scope has been extended, most importantly to include energy conservation and access for people with disabilities. The older standards are long established and are complied with routinely, while the energy consumption and disability access issues are more recent and often more difficult to satisfy.
Some property developers resent and resist the more recent Building Regulations: there is an obvious benefit in one’s building not burning to the ground, or not developing mould that damages the building and injures the inhabitants, but there is no comparable benefit in limiting energy use (the gains in capital value are marginal and usually less than the extra cost of construction) or in providing decent access for people with disabilities (as most purchasers do not have disabilities, accessible house are no more valuable). Abolishing the current minimum standards will allow developers to build houses to lower standards; this will damage the environment and will affect the vulnerable disproportionately: those with more economic power will continue to be decently housed while, over time, the poor will suffer decreasing standards and those with disabilities will tend to be ghettoised in specially adapted accommodation.
It appears that CLG intends either to restrict local authorities’ control of development, and/or to abolish certain housing standards (following ‘review’, of course). Either change will of course boost profits for housebuilders at the expense of the disadvantaged. This is consistent with other developer-friendly coalition policies which reduce democratic and legal control of development, such as removing the requirement for planning restrictions for house extensions, and the withdrawal of rights to challenge major planning decisions through judicial review.
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Gerard McLean is a Labour party member in Holborn and St Pancras CLP
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