A forum for open discussion on communities and local government policy.

Achieving Building Standards

The Government has recognised that there are some issues with the existing system of Building Regulation, including concerns about compliance and enforcement. In particular, the Government is interested in reviewing the effectiveness of its guidance, concerns about industry’s ability to find the right resources, and questions about whether Building Regulations are targeting the right things in the right way.

As a result we have initiated a programme of work to consider the current situation of Building Regulations and how we manage and maintain them, and to identify what we might do to improve this.

This topic will provide input to this work and will run until 13 December 2006. Below is a list of the points that we hope that this discussion will help us to address. We anticipate that many people will want to contribute to this discussion, so in order to manage the site more efficiently we will only be able to display responses which address at least one of the questions below, and which follow the discussion rules of this site.

  • Are building standards regulating for the right things in the right way?
  • Are these standards being achieved, and if not is there anything stopping them from being enforced?
  • What helps people to comply with them?
  • What stops people from complying with them?
  • How could we improve compliance and why will this work?

All of your views are welcome and will be even more effective if you state in which capacity they are made; either as a member of the general public e.g. home owner or as someone with a professional interest e.g. architect.

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Part P

Posted by mapj1 on 12/12/2006 - 17:19

Further to the observations by John Andrews, I could not agree more, what we suffer is a lot of hot air and cross referenceing to publications of other comittees. I fear because no-one will stick their neck out and quantify the true risk and cost balance of what they are doing.

(I have worked on standards commitees, and I know first hand how easy it is to add a bit to keep someone happy on thir pet topic, and how hard it is to get it taken out again afterwards.)
My personal interest in part P, as I have said earlier, but now a long way down the thread, is for the UKs 50, 000 or so licensed radio hams, many with outdoor antenna rotors, power amplifiers up masts in the garden and so on, that might or might not be notifiable work to play with (ahem). Clearly it is not the situation that the rule was brought in to restrict, but it does. We all have been told part P is to drive out cowboy contractors, although I am not sure how worthwhile this is. I fear, rather like banning hand gun ownership did not stop gun crime, it sounds good but is actually only penalising the good guys, as the bad guys won't give a rat's fuzzy wotsit for the following rules anyway.

Other activities don't do much harm, (like wiring ELV power outside to rotate antenna installations that will be removed when the owner moves house) so leave them off the list.
We could do worse than to use the HSE's unofficial maxim, that a fatality risk of much less than 1 per million per year is 'safe', being masked by other effects, and one of say 100,000:1 is definitely worth examining with a view to reduction. In that case, given one ham radio fatality since the war, as a result of an outdoor power installation, (and that was in the USA), we could probably afford to make "changes to ham radio stations maintined by experienced licence holders" non-notifiable. This will reduce the spread of the culture of having rules we don't actually follow except when we feel like it. (Partly as almost no body notifies changes at home anyway, it cannot make a perfectly safe status quo any more dangerous.)

More generally we need to examine the cost of any rule when introduced. Just because building regs are 'self funding' doesn't mean 'free', and money is removed from the public's back pockets for the privilege of a BCO or AI inspection. This is money that might be otherwise be spent getting the boiler serviced, or new brake pads for the car, so there is a possible immediate safety cost.

Anyone who doubts this is true must come up with a good explanation of why carbon monoxide poisenings from gas appliences have actually risen slightly since 1989 after the compulsory membership of CORGI came in for gas fitting businesses. (It was falling before) My observation is that paying for CORGI membership reduced the total number of fitters, and drove up prices, and the improved incomes of those who registered. But it also caused those customers right at the poorest end of the spectrum to decide to postphone their gas fire/boiler servicing 'just a bit' and for a few each year that gamble is tragically not correct. CO poisening is almost always poor combustion/vent or flue block, i.e poor maintainance, rather than the much rarer leak causing explosion that makes the headlines, which is usually poor installation in the first place. Of course if nothing had changed, we should have expected a noticable decline, partly because of the prior trend, and partly because of technical improvements such as CO detectors, oxygen depletion devices in new appliences and so on. - staying level would be failure, rising slightly to a new plateau is doubly so. Given that did not work, why will a similar idea work for electricity?

We must watch that Part P does not fall into the same trap, and that more folk are not tripped up and hurt by extension leads and adaptors than are 'saved' from poor wiring.

It often seems to me the comittees that decide these things would make things much simpler if they personally had to cough up in proportion to what it would really cost, or even if they were made to hike for a day each carrying a paper copy of their final product.

In short, simple is beautiful, if you cannot say why you need to regulate it, leave it out.

(now that post was way too long, no one will read down to here.)

Mike, G7VZY
(Senior Consultant Engineer, Phd Elec Eng)

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