Memorandum submitted by the National House
Building Federation
NHBC (National House Building Council) is the
world's most established standard setting body and home warranty
provider with over 20,000 builders on its Register and 1.7 million
homes protected with its Buildmark home warranty.
As a non-profit distributing company with over
70 years' experience working with the industry and the consumer,
NHBC is uniquely placed as an independent authority on the housing
industry.
NHBC also supports the industry and consumer
by providing essential services including building control, training,
health and safety and environmental services and by investing
in research, innovation and delivering industry solutions through
the NHBC Foundation and National Centre for Excellence in Housing.
NHBC welcomes this Inquiry into Existing Housing
Stock and Climate Change. NHBC's role is to raise the standards
of new build homes and provide consumer protection to homebuyers.
Our response is therefore focused on the aspects of this enquiry
related to the new build sector but because of the breadth of
our role and functions we have also commented on the industry
as a whole.
NHBC established the National Centre for Excellence
in Housing in partnership with the Building Research Establishment
to look at policy issues facing new-build and existing housing
stock. The National Centre has been appointed by Yvette Cooper
MP, Minister for Housing, to act as the policy secretariat for
the CLG Zero Carbon 2016 Task Force and would therefore be well
placed to engage with the Select Committee as the Inquiry progresses.
RAISING ENVIRONMENTAL
STANDARDS OF
NEW BUILD
Background to NHBC Standards
NHBC makes a considerable investment in the
NHBC Standards, the primary on site reference text for the Registered
house builder, which more than 20,000 NHBC registered builders
agree to comply with. These are updated continually and re-published
annually to reflect changing trends in housing construction and
our experience of problems, arising during, and in the ten years
after, construction.
As housing technology advances, NHBC increasingly
tries to be pre-emptive with the Standards—developing appropriate
requirements and guidance before problems occur. Recent examples
include:
— Light gauge steel frame housing—a
new chapter was introduced in 2005 to cover this technology, which
is rapidly establishing itself as the third most significant form
of construction.
— Curtain walling and cladding—Chapter
6.9, also introduced in 2005, is especially relevant for the growing
number of high-rise buildings under NHBC cover. The Chapter encourages
the specification of systems that have been appropriately tested
and introduced guidance on how interfaces between systems should
be dealt with to avoid the problems sometimes encountered where
these systems have been used in the commercial sector.
— The April 2007 edition includes a
revised specification for flat roof coverings—it restricts
the specification for acceptable materials to those which offer
enhanced durability and responds to the sustainability agenda
by including specifications for "green roofs".
Existing Stock
Existing housing is far more significant in
terms of energy use than new build and NHBC believes it is essential
that the gap between the excellent performance of new build housing
and the existing stock is closed.
Most of the solutions to improve the performance
of existing stock are well established and there is a wealth of
authoritative information available.
It is important that we find the solutions which
are financially cost-effective. It is even more important that
the solutions deliver an actual reduction in CO2 emissions
when proper account has been taken of emissions during manufacture,
transport and installation.
District solutions should be investigated, eg
the provision of district heat networks and combined heat and
power. It is important that systems (boilers, renewable energy,
ventilation plant) and controls are easily understood by those
using them. If some people are not even able to operate their
video recorders, there must be doubt as to whether they will be
able to operate other equipment in their homes to achieve optimal
performance.
Performance of new build zero carbon homes
With reference to new build, NHBC has specialist
understanding of, and involvement in, the technical aspects of
house building as well as unique knowledge of consumer protection
issues through our Buildmark warranty.
NHBC supports the sustainability agenda and
we are supportive of the Government's objective to achieve carbon
neutral homes. However our concerns about this policy focus on:
Consumer: Ensuring the protection of the consumer
Science: Sound solutions based on credible science
Reputation: Ensuring consumer support and backing
of the objectives
Implementation : Need for nationally applied
consistent standards
Partnership : Ensuring industry, Government
and Stakeholders work together
Consumer protection must be placed at the forefront
of technological advances. We strongly believe that consumers
must not be exposed to unnecessary risks and used to trial zero-carbon
technologies and systems that have not undergone thorough testing
and accreditation. There is currently a dearth of tested and certificated
microgeneration technologies and systems. Asking consumers to
pay for and maintain products and systems that are not reliable
or fail to deliver the claimed benefits is inappropriate and could
have damaging repercussions. There are also important lessons
for us to learn from the past and from around the world.
In British Columbia a massive failure of new
homes due to water penetration, rotting and eventual failure of
inadequately designed and constructed timber frame housing systems
affected up to 10,000 homes, in a market roughly the size of Scotland.
The total cost to the British Columbia economy was between two
and five billion Canadian dollars. The British Colombian warranty
programme failed, many homebuyers faced considerable hardship
and the house-building industry was seriously affected for a number
of years.
Similar failures experienced in New Zealand
and the USA illustrate that change must be well thought through,
well managed, and the risks identified and eliminated to avoid
causing great distress and cost to homebuyers.
NHBC has significant concerns about the role
of planning in raising environmental standards. Evidence suggests
that there is growing competition between planning authorities
setting increasingly tougher, and sometimes ill thought through,
targets in their planning guidance. Given that climate change
is a national (and international) issue, we would question the
logic of competing local targets being set: it makes more sense
to have one, national, target.
The fact that planning authorities have different
targets causes problems for architects and designers (often Small
and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)), designing homes in more than one
planning authority area. Differing targets are also a challenge
for house builders and are likely to reduce their efficiency,
reduce economies of scale and increase the potential for defects
to occur, as well as having implications for achieving the output
of new housing proposed in the Barker Review.
Based on the evidence we have seen, we would
question the ability of the professionals working in planning
authorities, especially smaller authorities, to deal with the
technical aspects of sustainability. There is no doubt that building
control professionals are able to deal with these complex issues.
We are strongly of the view that most of these (with the exception
of spatial issues) should be dealt with through building regulations.
Taking a national view, it would appear that
each extra pound spent on further improving new housing may be
better spent elsewhere, eg improving the existing stock. Instruments
that allow offsetting in this way should be explored fully.
ISSUES FACING
THE INDUSTRY
Building Regulations
The implementation of building regulations has
important implications for the industry. In recent times the industry
has suffered from poor implementation of regulation, for example
Part L of Building Regulations in 2006 and the current introduction
of Home Information Packs. NHBC believes that a regulatory framework,
where the Government sets objectives, but the industry works on
methods and processes to implement those objective, is the most
successful framework and the most likely to deliver successful
outcomes for Government and industry.
It is within this context and the debate about
the quantity, role and implementation of regulation that NHBC
can help play a vital role in the future. NHBC, in partnership
with the Building Research Establishment (BRE), has set up the
National Centre for Excellence in Housing, a new industry led
partnership. The National Centre will work to identify practical
solutions and address the challenges and opportunities facing
the housing sector. It is establishing a group of experts and
key opinion leaders to facilitate policy development and strategic
thinking to help frame the research and policy agenda for housing
in the UK.
NHBC believes the National Centre could provide
the Government with an ideal platform to consult the industry
on a range of regulatory and associated issues.
Skills and Training: Availability of, and investment
in skills
NHBC provides strong support to the industry's
skills development agenda with its provision of training and qualifications
programmes. Our primary focus is on home building, with many of
our programmes focussed on site based management staff, but we
also offer programmes to the wider construction industry.
We are the largest provider of construction
management NVQs in the UK. We also offer our own site manager
accreditation programme which combines assessment of management
and technical competence with a check on quality of work on site
and an assessment of commitment to continuing professional development.
Accreditation is renewable every three years and is dependant
on managers continuing to deliver acceptable site quality and
continuing to update their skills and knowledge.
In addition to our qualification/accreditation
programmes we deliver approximately 1,150 days training per year.
This provides around 12,000 person days training. Subjects include
management skills, personal skills, technical knowledge and Health
and Safety.
The availability of skills within the house-building
industry was addressed in Professor Michael Ball's investigation
and report for the HBF—The Labour Needs of Extra Housing
Output: Can the House Building Industry Cope? One of the report's
conclusions was that, while training issues are important in the
expansion of house building, it can be concluded that skills shortages
are unlikely to represent a barrier to expansion of the house
building industry. ConstructionSkills, in its 2004 report "Skills
Needs Analysis for Construction", estimated that the construction
industry as a whole needs to recruit and train 88,000 entrants
per year for the next five years (based on the "most likely"
growth figure of 2.3% per year).
From our experience providing training services
within the industry, NHBC believes that there has been substantial
improvement in the last 10 years in investment and training. We
have seen greater recognition in the industry that skills development
rather than "hire and fire" does have a contribution
to make to business success. The Major Contractors Group's (MCG)
and, more latterly, the Major Home Builders Group's (MHBG), commitments
to the Qualified Workforce initiative are further indications
of this improvement.
The current structure in home building (and
in areas of general construction), with largely sub-contracted
labour, puts a lot of responsibility for quality control on the
site manager or site management team. For this reason much of
NHBC's training provision is aimed at assistant site managers,
site managers, project managers and contracts/construction managers.
Competence requirements for site management staff can be divided
into two broad areas—technical and managerial.
Historically technical competence was less demanding
with construction methods for low rise housing changing only slowly
over time. More recently, and for the foreseeable future, there
is a real need for managers to keep abreast of technical developments
around the move towards greater use of Modern Methods of Construction
(MMC), technical issues surrounding the sustainability agenda,
and the move to more high rise apartment and mixed-use developments
employing more complex and/or "commercial" methods of
construction. It is very difficult to quality control methods
of construction that are not fully understood. Structured training
programmes are required to ensure managers are competent in the
methods of construction they are overseeing. Work done by the
HBF, concerning the increased use of MMC, in a response to the
Barker Review also highlighted this need.
Equally important to site management staff are
managerial competencies. The site or project manager role is complex
and is becoming increasingly so with more apartments, more mixed-use
developments and higher densities.
Research and Development
Two of the key challenges which the industry
faces at present are developing new methods of construction and
working to improve the environmental efficiency of new buildings.
As discussed above, NHBC invests in research, innovation and delivering
industry solutions through the NHBC Foundation and National Centre
for Excellence in Housing.
The NHBC Foundation was set up in 2006 to address
the "information gap" in the industry on a variety of
topics. Chaired by former housing minister, Rt. Hon. Nick Raynsford
MP, the Foundation has dedicated itself to a programme of pragmatic,
delivery-based research of relevant to the industry. Its inaugural
project delivered a web-based resource tool on MMC and subsequently
it has delivered a research document offering a detailed guide
to MMC and most recently a programme of research dedicated to
the sustainability and zero carbon agenda. The latest finding
focuses on Ground Source Heat Pumps. Throughout 2007 it will also
be delivering research on renewable energy systems, site waste
and other topics of relevance to the sustainability and zero carbon
agenda.
The National Centre for Excellence in Housing,
is also chaired by Rt. Hon. Nick Raynsford MP. The Centre, also
independent, arose from considerable interest and support for
a body with a wider function and a significantly wider remit.
The Centre is focusing on enabling and inspiring excellence and
improved standards in new and existing housing.
The Centre brings together stakeholders and
interested parties to develop policy solutions to issues faced
by the industry. The Centre is also currently focused on the sustainability
agenda and in May 2007 hosted a series of focus group events specifically
tasked to the zero carbon home target.
NHBC Standards play an important role in taking
account of changes in materials and construction methods and require
that new systems and materials be adequately tested and accredited.
Leading on from this NHBC uses its technical expertise to carry
out its own research to ensure it is best addressing the issues
posed by changes in the industry and is working in conjunction
with Government on relevant projects such as the current DTI/BRE
project developing certification systems for renewable energy
systems.
In addition NHBC Technical has carried out a
review of renewable technology to deliver best practice guidance
and information to the new home building industry. Both NHBC Technical
and NHBC's Building Control Services department act specialist
advisors to Parliament on technical issues, Building Regulations
and regulatory reform/changes.
ORAL EVIDENCE
NHBC is an independent expert authority on the
house building industry. We would welcome the opportunity to share
our expertise on environmental issues relating to new build, through
oral evidence to the Committee at a later stage.
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