One ‘L' of a carry on

Imagine the outcry if teachers had been marking GCSE papers without access to the correct answers. Or rather, using last year's answers. "Er…this seems about right. I'll pass this pupil." It couldn't happen.

But this is exactly the position in which building control officers find themselves with the new Part L of the Building Regulations. The government has made its political point about saving the planet, meanwhile building control professionals are left trying to find a pragmatic way through the chaos. And yes, there has been, and will be, some bending of the rules.

"The whole thing is a joke," says Nick Seaton, head of building control for Fenland District Council. "We are all receiving applications that strictly need to comply with the new regulations and we cannot physically check them."

The government brought in the new version of Part L of the Building Regulations, which covers energy efficiency on 6 April, only three weeks after the final version was published. As CM went to press, guidance documentation still had not been published and neither had most of the approved software necessary to do the calculations for housing.

Nor was there a six-month grace period, as people had been lead to believe. In February, the government announced in a press release that this would not apply because it wanted to get down to cutting carbon emissions and immediately. It forgot to send this message out to building control officers, though. "The first I knew about it was when you phoned," says one head of building control.

Impossible deadline

"Everybody in the industry, including the ex-Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, knows we are not in a position to introduce it but the date is a political imperative," says Phil Harrison, business development director with LABC, a company which represents local authority building control departments. Because he is not working for a council, he can afford to be a little more outspoken: "Everybody knows it's not only impractical, it's physically impossible."

Building control officers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On one side, their bosses at the council, pushing the sustainability agenda and wanting to do the right thing. On the other, their clients, confused, possibly enraged by the sudden disappearance of a grace period and capable of taking their business elsewhere since building control was opened out to competition from the private sector. Strictly, any projects without full building control or not on site before April 6 should meet the new Part L requirements. In practice, many local authorities will have operated an unofficial transition period, perhaps to the end of April. Building control officers also had to advise to some major project clients to start on site once they realised the grace period was not happening.

March and April were busy months for building control officers all over the UK as developers rushed to push their applications through. "That two or three weeks was incredibly difficult for us," says Kevin Dawson, head of building control at Peterborough City Council, whose team processed a rush of 400 housing applications before the deadline. "We've probably got six month's lead in time now." He believes that projects which have full building control will have 12 months to get on site, although this has yet to be officially confirmed by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG, what was the ODPM).

Another building control manager received a phone call from his concerned chief executive just before the April deadline. His boss was in a panic because he had found out that the schools deal the council had been working on for three years was going to increase in value by 5% thanks to the new Part L requirements, making it unaffordable. Fortunately, the project was already on site (thanks to building control's tip-off).

So when can we expect the new regime to really kick in? The first hurdle is getting everybody through training. The DCLG is producing a training CD but as CM went to press it was not yet out. Some 20 training courses were planned around the country for last month and this month, but the problem is that nobody wanted to book their people on them until the final version of the document was in place. Once it was out, there was a mad rush but too few places. There are about 3,000 building control surveyors in the UK.

Dawson is sending four of his team up to Newcastle. In the meantime, it is a case of making sure people have read through and understood the documents.

Chaos looming

While the jigsaw remains incomplete, the advice to would-be developers and contractors is sit down with your local authority and talk things through. For commercial projects, the engineers involved are likely to be up-to-speed with the implications of the new regulations. There are problems with the software which calculates the carbon dioxide output of non-domestic buildings, though.

"It's pretty much unworkable, not very user-friendly," says Seaton. " And the supporting documentation is not there to allow you to put the figures in."

It’s pretty much unworkable, not very user-friendly, And the supporting documentation is not there

Nick Seaton, Fenland District council

So engineers have to make a case for how their building meets the spirit of the regulations.

"A lot of service engineers have been fully aware of the design changes. It's a matter of taking a pragmatic approach," says Ian Bolton, head of building control at Cambridge City Borough Council. "There's no point saying, ‘please comply with this document', if the document has not been published."

There will be some buildings, such as large PFI schemes, that have been on the drawing board for several years that will require total redesign to meet the letter of the new Part L. Here again, building control officers may well take a pragmatic view, perhaps requiring evidence that the yearly carbon dioxide emissions are 27% less than they would have been under the old regime. Harrison talks about "a test of reasonableness which we cannot acknowledge".

Volume housebuilders should not be caught up too much in the initial chaos. Most will have done what is necessary to make sure imminent new developments go ahead under the old regs. That means getting full building control approval or starting on site before 6 April.

Householders looking to do extensions should be OK too, since the regulations apply the old ‘elemental' method. This means making sure that each part of the building, like a window or wall, meets a set thermal performance level.

The people who will be hardest hit are the small builders. "The person these regulations have not dealt with is the ordinary builders, the artisan we all love," says Andy Bayer, building control manager with South Cambridgeshire Borough Council. "He is not in a position where he can do an application any more."

Applications must show the building's yearly carbon dioxide output, and that can only be calculated by someone who has been approved to use the software. Building control officers, although they will have been trained to use the software, can't do this for the jobbing builder, where in the past they could have sat down and examined insulation, say. So that's more work for consultants and more cost on small projects; Bayer estimates £1,000 to £2,000.

Spirit of the regs

So what is happening with those applications that arrived just that bit too late to slip in under the wire but too early for everyone to be up to speed with the new version? "We are applying the new regulations as best we can," says Dawson. So for example, they might ask a builder to increase U-values by 20% to meet the spirit of the regulations

But he reckons that the you-know-what could really start hitting the fan later in the year. "Most people are not really aware of the new requirements. They've got sufficient on their books to work on. Come back and ask me what's happening in October."

Seaton reckons it will be two years before things are running smoothly with the new regulations. Until then it's just business as usual for building control. "This is nothing new to us," says John Prime, head of building control for East Cambridgeshire Borough Council.

"It's worse than normal but we have had to go through lost of totally new documents and new pieces of legislation like Part P.

"We are used to dealing with these issues and coming to sensible and practical solutions."