It is said that all good things come to those who wait. But few could have expected that we would have been waiting quite so long for the documents detailing changes to Part L that were finally made available via the government’s Planning Portal just before Christmas.
Although the published details were indeed very late in coming, it wasn’t as if they were entirely unexpected. Perhaps what the government couldn’t have foreseen in the delay between the Consultation being announced and the long-overdue publication of the guidance was the mood of the nation. It is clear that, in the intervening period, what floats their political boats has changed and so the pendulum has swung from wanting to be seen to be green to a feeling of ‘pounds in pockets’.
The Building Regulations have a consultation period to gather opinions but these also have to go through economic tests and a process of weighing up the benefits versus the cost. So the bottom line is how much more does it cost UK Plc and what savings does it get back?
With the new guidance, we are seeing the effect of hitting the bottom of that cost/benefit curve. With the setting of overall domestic carbon dioxide emissions reduction at 6% (down from 8% in the consultation) and nondomestic down to 9%, one can see it has been much harder to prove an economic case. We are all still talking about ‘zero carbon’ as the ultimate goal, but this journey has been helped by measures along the way: for example, the removal of the burden of energy consumed for appliances was made some time ago. This, along with the introduction of Allowable Solutions, makes zero carbon a realistic target – without ever reaching the utopian ideal. In essence, Allowable Solutions is a tax that encourages people to get close to the targets – and then gives them an easier way to reach them. Proposals by the previous government suggested Allowable Solutions may include measures such as retrofitting existing homes to ‘offset’ emissions from new homes, and a fund into which housebuilders could pay for the delivery of renewable infrastructure.
In reality, people are looking for the simplest solution possible. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the economic tests make it clear that in order to make further significant drops towards zero carbon, new technology needs to be invented to make it more cost-effective; at the moment, this is not happening.
The new documents will come into effect on April 6, and it will be interesting to see how long the industry will take to bed them in. Zero carbon is still the goal; the latest measures take us there, but it’s a very circuitous route!
