News analysis with BESA
Managing the building control crisis will be crucial
A looming crisis in the building inspection profession just when the government is proposing to liberalise planning rules could seriously undermine eff orts to improve safety and quality, according to the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA).
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any building professionals have expressed concern about the government’s plans to further loosen permitted development rights (PDR) to make it easier to turn commercial buildings into homes.
PDR allows developers to convert disused commercial properties into homes without having to apply for planning permission. It is seen as part of the solution to the serious housing shortage, but many fear it could create a whole new generation of ‘slum’ dwellings in inner city locations. The housing charity Shelter has warned this could lead to even more people living in “squalid conditions” because many of the commercial properties targeted by the policy are not suitable for conversion. About 100,000 homes have been created out of former commercial buildings
since PDR was fi rst liberalised 11 years ago by David Cameron’s government and the current housing minister Michael Gove wants to expand their reach further to take in more large offi ce blocks and disused shops. Many of these could, on paper, be successfully converted but as has often been the case over the past 11 years many may well end up as small, poorly ventilated homes with little outside access – many PDR properties don’t even have windows. Earlier problems with PDR forced the government to introduce minimum size rules and legislate for access to natural light, but it seems that lesson has not been learned and the new proposal could create more problematic dwellings.
Dramatic
Since PDR was fi rst extended, we have had the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017, a pandemic that highlighted the importance of good quality indoor air quality (IAQ) to protect human health and well-being (including mental health), and a dramatic increase in the number of homes suff ering from condensation and mould.
One particularly appalling apartment in Rochdale led directly to the death of
two-year-old Awaab Ishak and the subsequent creation of Awaab’s Law to hold landlords to account if they failed to address poor living conditions. The Building Safety Act came into force in 2022 as a direct result of Grenfell and has led to signifi cant changes to the building regulations which apply to all buildings and are closely monitored by our emergency services. All these developments came about because of the limitations of a development
process that left too many building occupants unsafe and living in sub-standard buildings that actively contributed to poor health and social mobility. One of the ‘quality control’ measures introduced by the Health & Safety
Executive, which is overseeing the Act, was to turn building control into a regulated profession to ensure inspectors were professionally competent. This requires an estimated 4,500 building control offi cers (BCOs) to be registered and certifi ed by April 6th. However, this has created a new crisis with local authorities saying they will not be able to carry out inspections or serve stop-go notices from that date because very few of their BCOs are registered.
Local Authority Building Control (LABC), which represents BCOs, has called for
a six-month delay so that inspections can continue while more of its members are registered and assessed, but this is shaping up to be a much longer-term challenge. Several industry observers point out that the building control regime has been under-resourced for years and many BCOs are choosing to retire rather than go through the new competence assessment process. So, while the housing minister is pushing for legislation that would allow
more commercial buildings to become residential properties without planning permission, regardless of their size, the quality control system is under severe strain and could lead to even more sub-standard and potentially unsafe buildings. “It feels like we didn’t learn the lesson. It was the bigger buildings that were
lower quality in many cases,” said Professor Ben Cliff ord from University College London whose study for the government found that only 22% of homes built under PDR between 2015 and 2018 met acceptable space and access standards. The government is under huge pressure to build more homes and with more
commercial buildings becoming available for conversion following the collapse of high street shopping and the changes in working patterns that have freed up offi ce space, PDR makes sense.
10 March 2024
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