42 INDUSTRY VIEWFINDER


INTRODUCTION A


s part of the Government’s progress towards its legal commitment to achieving net zero by 2050, following consultation with industry and legislation introduced in 2022, new homes in England must produce 31% fewer carbon emissions. At the same time as these tightened provisions within Part L of the Building Regulations, Part F has also been strengthened to ensure that new homes are well ventilated. Part O is the third of the trio of new legal measures in terms of building performance, but this is a brand new regulation designed to ensure that more air-tight homes do not only not suffer from poor indoor air quality, but that they also do not disproportionately overheat. Broadly speaking, Part L 2021 is largely about improvements to the building fabric, in particular, insulation, but some developers have already taken the route of using green energy to help meet the 31% fewer emissions target, as our survey shows. Therefore, alongside the use of solar PV and other renewables, comes the advent of air source heat pumps as the ‘hot new solution’ for providing low carbon heating to homes with much improved fabric standards. While heat us are not the anacea ie their effi ciency will be drastically hampered if the building isn’t designed and constructed to otiise enery effi ciency, they are acknowleded as the ost


realistic way forward for housebuilders to achieve the carbon reductions that will be required by the Future Homes Standard. In our 2022 study the vast majority of our respondents were saller fi rs buildin under  hoes a year  n our  sale this was a slihtly lower fi ure , however it still demonstrates a high cohort of SME builders (a quarter were building between 50 and 1000 homes a year, and just 2% over 1000). With the SME sector having been decimated since the 2008 credit crunch, they face a very different set of challenges to the volume housebuilders the new Regs.


THE PROBLEM WITH PARTS L, F & O


T


he newly updated Regulations (Parts L, F and the new art , brin a host of secifi c challenes to housebuilders. These range from new reporting methods which require housebuilders to take photos of each part of a house’s construction to attempt to close the gap between design and built erforance, to the new abric nery ffi ciency Standard (FEES). We also investigated a range of solutions approaches such as respondents’ choice of building technologies and materials.


YEAR-ON-YEAR COMPARISON We asked a series of questions which replicated those asked in our  survey in order to roduce coarative fi ures These included the extent of the increases in construction costs they were facing, and whether they were able to pass those costs on to their customers. Whereas in 2022 we asked people a general question about which building technologies they were using in order to meet Part L, F and O (with options ranging from fabric measures to low carbon heating and renewables), and


the associated cost increases, this year we applied a bit more detail to add value to the study. We looked at the issue of which technologies our respondents were specifying, which fabric measures they were prioritising, which were their preferred eco heating and ventilation and renewables measures, and which secifi cation asects were reuirin ore staff trainin, or had skills shortages.


The uestions also looked at ore secifi c issues such as hoeowner educationawareness, lack of fi nancial incentives for builders, and the potential need to change suppliers. We also asked them about the particular challenges of having to measure carbon reductions across development sites, and how they were addressing this.


COMPARING BARRIERS


In both this year’s survey and the previous year’s, we looked at the key issues around secifi cation for housebuilders raised by the new Part L and Part F, and how they rated those barriers relative to each other. This meant that as well as rating


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