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Future Homes and Buildings Standard takes a step forward

The Future Homes and Buildings Standard (FHS) has taken a step forward with confirmation of an interim step for England, paving the way for a net zero ready Future Buildings / Homes Standard by 2025. Sustainability Director, Barny Evans shares a summary on what the new regulations mean for the future.

From June this year the new Part L of the Building Regulations will take effect to increase the performance needed from all new buildings in England.

What does this mean for building standards? 

Any buildings where notice or planning applications are submitted before June 2022 will have one year to start work using the old regulations. After that, all new build plots will need to comply with the new regulations. This is a significant change, as traditionally once you had permission you could construct to the same regulations for the whole development. 

Most major housing projects will have elements that can comply with current regulations, some will need to comply with the 2022 changes, and others will need to meet the full FHS from 2025. 

Focusing on the domestic element, the benefits should be around a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions, lower bills and greater comfort. The costs are estimated at around an additional £4k per house, but my suspicion is that will be an over-estimation.

There are two main compliance criteria used:

• Primary Energy Factor – a complex metric which accounts for all the energy required to get to the building, including losses on distribution and efficiencies of power generation for electricity, for example from power stations. This is not popular in most engineering circles as it is less logical in a world of more renewable energy.
• Target CO2 Emission Rate – as with the previous regulations, new homes will need to have a lower CO2 emission rate than that of a notional building. This will take account of fabric standards, lighting and the heating system.

There will also be a fabric energy efficiency requirement, as previously. The changes in build standards are modest, with a small increase in the standards of insulation required, more efficient lighting. My understanding of the uplift in standards is that they have been chosen in a way that will not require significant change to current construction techniques, for example standard width cavity wall construction will still work, and double glazing will still meet the performance requirement. 

There will also be a tightening of standards on quality control, with all homes required to have an air pressure test and better data stored on construction standards.

Heat pumps

The biggest change, however, is the CO2 emission factor for electricity, where it goes from 0.519 kgCO2 per kWh to 0.136. This implies that all-electric buildings, with heat pumps for heating, will be much lower carbon generally, and lower carbon than gas boilers or combined heat and power (CHP). There is a consensus that this is a good thing, our regulations have been out of date for a long time. The future of heating in buildings is electric and up to now Regulations had discouraged heat pumps.

There will soon need to be a wholesale switch from gas boilers to heat pumps in new homes. This change will require a revolution in the supply chain; manufacturers, installers, designers and retailers. Even consumers will need to alter how they act. 

The UK currently installs about 30,000 a year and once all new homes use heat pumps that will require around 200,000 systems to be installed, never mind the retrofit market. The government has tried to use this interim step in the FHS to drive that increase in supply chain prior to the wholesale switchover in 2025. What I am hearing from industry is that most housebuilders are continuing to use gas where developments will be complete by 2025, but on most major masterplans that will be built post-2025, there is a preference to set a consistent all-electric approach with heat pumps for the whole development. In any case, homes will now need to have heating systems that can be easily retrofitted with heat pumps in the future.

Controversially, there has been a tweak to how CO2 emissions from gas-fired heat networks are calculated. Under the emission factors most heat networks would be so high carbon they wouldn’t be legal, but a tweak will allow connections to continue, at least until 2025. Many of our clients are keen to avoid connections now because of the air pollution and CO2 emissions, and so careful discussions may be required in areas where heat networks exist. 

New Building Regulations

There are two new Building Regulations announced, in parallel.

• Part O sets out requirements around avoiding the issue of overheating. This provides two routes to compliance; limiting glazing to a certain percentage of floor area, varying on whereabouts in the country it is, or using software modelling to demonstrate the home will not overheat. The glazing percentages allowed are likely to be restrictive in some cases and, in high-risk locations such as city centre flats in London and Manchester, software modelling may be preferred to give more design flexibility.
• Part S sets out the requirement for each new home with an allocated parking space to have an electric vehicle charger, with some exceptions on cost and where there are more parking spaces than dwellings. 

The process to get to these regulations has been slow and several years later than originally planned. They don’t please everyone, with many pushing to eliminate gas boilers immediately and implement higher fabric standards. It is not ideal that we will have new buildings with gas heating systems which we know we need to change already. I share the fear that the supply chain and standards / oversight could not have coped if we had switched wholesale to heat pumps this year.

That said, there is no excuse not to be ready for 2025.

Please get in touch with Barny Evans if you’d like to learn more about the Future Homes and Building Standards.

16 February 2022