If you were building a new house, and you wanted to enter the record books for “deepest foundation ever”, you could dig a hole down to the centre of the Earth, and fill it with concrete. Provided there was nothing of interest directly below your construction site, there would be no regulation preventing you from doing this. 

You would need to excavate about 10,000m³ of earth from the hole, buy thousands of tonnes of cement, gravel, sand and water, make 3,000 journeys in a concrete wagon, and there would be some pretty interesting technical challenges along the way to ensure safe construction… but you would be within your legal rights to try.

Your impact on the environment would be the emission of at least 2,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere – more than 250 times the annual carbon footprint of that house’s owner. But don’t worry, that would not cause any legal challenges to your quest to go down in history for deepest foundation.

The lack of regulation in this area means that one in 10 of the UK’s emissions now result from our use of construction materials and their resulting “embodied carbon” emissions.

Contrast this with UK regulation on energy efficiency. Since 2002, the Building Regulations have limited the amount of energy that a new home can use.