Why don’t we combine planning and building control?

So why don’t we collapse building and planning approvals into one system? Planners and building control officers do distinct jobs. Yet they could do their specialised jobs better by working together.

Building control originated from Local Improvement Acts in 18th century London, when local building regulations stimulated by the Great Fire of 1666 were codified in the London Building Act of 1774. By the 1840s progress was being made everywhere in sanitation, water supply, ventilation, and access to daylight.

New utilities infrastructure suggested that there should be national regulations, but local councillors only had the authority to impose local bye-laws. Model bye-laws were often adopted from the late 1850s, bringing technical consistency for builders and design professionals.

By 1920, when Sir Ernest Moir was chairman of the Committee for Standardisation and New Methods of Construction, novel construction ‘systems’ were mooted to overcome serious materials and skilled labour shortages after the First World War. But labour skills recovered, and materials flowed again. The subsidies for ‘innovations’ in the Housing, Town Planning Act had little effect. Christopher Addison’s 1919 Act required that local authorities provide council housing for rent and both this public and private house building standardised, mostly around masonry construction.

It wasn’t until 1965 that the first National Building Regulations were introduced – three years before annual production in Britain peaked at 413,000 homes. Since then Building Control has operated nationally, charged with delivering the improvements in building performance demanded by government. However, building control officers are under resourced, reduced to ‘drive by’ inspections and the plethora of site tests and ‘robust details’ are mostly observed in the breach. To cope better, the national organisation of Local Authority Building Control promotes the pre-approval of ‘types’ as systems.

The pre-history of national building control took four centuries. Worse, when government nationalised development rights in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, it failed to unify planning with building production. Planning legislation has been revised constantly since, and it has so far been technically possible for land use approvals to be given to indicative building designs before they were made to work as construction.

That is no longer viable. The Code for Sustainable Homes of December 2006 points to a time when every new home will perform as well as the Halley IV Antarctic Research Station (see CM February 2007). In future, all planning applications will be at risk unless the applicant knows that high performance can be delivered on budget.

For the volume builders this means retaining a stable of consultants who can offer whole building solutions of minimal construction thicknesses and building services at the planning stage. For smaller builders, or the one off applicant, these consultants cannot be retained.

But there is another way for local authorities to plan repetitive buildings like housing – and it doesn’t mean a return to council building. Based on the LABC ‘type’ approval it is possible to liberate planning approvals from the site.

Suppose that democratically approved planning approvals were awarded to consortia of construction materials manufacturers working in partnership with specialist consultants to produce a ‘pattern book’ of whole building solutions intended to be built on many discrete sites with a range of topologies. Then local authorities could pre-approve designs both aesthetically and technically before any land was specified. The value of approval would attach to economic designs for repetitive building types, which could then be marketed to all those wanting to build in the locality.

The pre-approved designs could be purchased from a range of pattern books sanctioned by the elected planning committee, their officers, and the LABC inspectors. The prospective client and its contractor could set about building precisely to the pre-approved detailed design on a multiplicity of small plots without further delay. Scaled up, a ‘type approvals’ approach might develop regionally through building and planning regulation in one administrative system.