Author: Eve Pardoe

You’ve probably heard about the Tiny House movement, but how about Tiny Forests?

These hit the UK national news recently, with a piece on the BBC’s news website, but to be honest it’s a new one on me!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-56003562 | https://earthwatch.org.uk/get-involved/tiny-forests

We’ve mentioned before on our Facebook page the perhaps surprising fact that some urban areas of the UK beat some of our rural landscapes for tree cover – particularly in areas of intensive agriculture – and Tiny forests would also seem to add the opportunity to massively enhance biodiversity in urban and suburban environments.

The concept also raises important questions about landscape architecture, urban design, and even the way we use our private gardens. The traditional approach prioritises occupier amenity over ecology and environment, with neatly trimmed lawns and heavily-managed planting of non-native species, and woe betide any neighbour who doesn’t cut their grass every Sunday morning in summer.

One of the pillar’s of Boris’ recent Planning White Paper was a proposal for ‘tree lined streets’. Whilst this sounds laudable and lovely in principle, it is fraught with practical issues (highways visibility and safety, impact on below-ground services, management costs and commuted sums for ‘adoption’ of the trees by already financially over-stretched Highways Authorities). Perhaps a better solution in some cases would be the incorporation of unmanaged buffer zones/wildlife corridors along the back of residential gardens on new developments, with the increased privacy and ecological benefit that these would offer being allowed to offset a reduction in the size of managed rear gardens for the direct amenity of human residents?

It would take a major shift in thinking for the Hyacinth Bouquets amongst us, but maybe we need to stand back and think about the limited amenity use many of us put our gardens to, versus the potential ecological benefits of allowing partial ‘re-wilding’ of the domestic landscape?

Introduction of proposed changes to Building Regulations
(Parts L and F – Energy Efficiency and Ventilation)

We’re slightly late posting this news, simply because we’ve been too busy to write blog posts, but the English Government has finally published a definite time line for introduction of revised Building Regulations moving toward the Future Homes Standard, which aims to make new homes ‘zero carbon ready’ by 2025.

The first step is an ‘interim uplift’ to Part L of the Building Regulations, requiring a 31% reduction in carbon emissions, compared to current Regulations. The timeframe for introduction of these changes has now been confirmed:

• Consultation drafts of the revised approved documents have been published and final versions will be published in December of this year.
• The new Approved Documents will come into force in June 2022.
• Transitional arrangements will be tougher than usual, applying to individual homes (not whole developments) and being limited to 1 year.

This means that any new building registered under current Regulations will need to commence construction before June 2022 and will need to be completed by June 2023, otherwise it will need to be upgraded to meet the new standards.

The definition of ‘building’ means that this will apply to a detached house, semis or a row of terrace houses, or blocks of flats.

As many will already be aware, the upgrade in the Regulations will be accompanied by a shift in the way carbon emissions are calculated, such that it will favour the use of electricity for heating much more strongly than the previous methodology – the justification for this being that much more of our electricity is now being generated by sustainable sources than it was when the old version of the SAP calculation methodology was written. This will mark the beginning of the end for fossil fuel boilers, and the ascendancy of heat pumps as the ‘normal’ method of heating our nation’s homes.

It was originally anticipated that the Fabric Energy Efficiency element of the requirements was set to be deleted – meaning, in essence, that it wouldn’t have much mattered how much energy your building used, provided that energy was generated by low or zero-carbon sources. It now looks like this is NOT going to be the case, however. The Fabric Energy Efficiency requirement is likely not only to be saved, but looks set to be made 15% tougher than at present – though final confirmation of this will need to wait for the publication of the new Approved Documents in December.

Look out for further detail and commentary on the forthcoming changes in our blog over this summer.

Consultation drafts of the Approved Documents can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-regulations-approved-documents-l-f-and-overheating-consultation-version

And the overall Government response to the Future Homes Standard consultation  is available to read here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/956094/Government_response_to_Future_Homes_Standard_consultation.pdf

More grumbles are reaching our ears about the length of time Local Planning Authorities are taking to validate Planning applications at present.

Now while we all have some sympathy with the internal communication difficulties, and therefore delays, being imposed by Covid, I suspect that poor management is turning this into a vicious circle that will be costing the building economy a huge amount of time and money, overall.

Planning applications have ‘statutory’ determination periods that in theory mean that LPA’s are obliged to determine applications within fixed periods – 13 weeks for major applications, 8 weeks for most other stuff. The problem is that the clock starts ticking on these determination periods from the day after a VALID application is RECEIVED… so if an LPA takes 4 weeks to validate it, it halves the time their Officers have to actually determine the application and effectively makes it impossible, with minor applications like householder extensions, because of the periods required to advertise and consult upon the application.

As a result, there is clear evidence (though obviously denied by individual LPA’s) that the administrative staff dealing with the validation process are doing their utmost to find problems with applications, in order that they can claim they are ‘invalid’, thus buying their Officers more time on processing periods.

The evidence is that well over 50% of all applications are rejected as invalid upon first submission – many for entirely trivial reasons – and the cumulative time and effort battling a way through this process must be costing the industry an enormous amount in total. There used to be published national guidance encouraging LPA’s to adopt a more flexible approach to the validation process (link: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/7727/1505220.pdf ), but astonishingly, this has now been withdrawn and replaced by guidance stipulating a much more rigid and buereacratic approach (link: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/making-an-application#validation-of-an-application )

If the Government wants to speed up the Planning process, they’d be well-advised to address some of the basic bureaucratic bottlenecks, before adding further complexity and confusion with their endless stream of amendments to Permitted Development rights.

In the meanwhile: the trick to achieving first time validation is careful scrutiny of your LPA’s Local Validation Requirements. Even we don’t get it right every time (we don’t think there’s an Architect or Planning Consultant out there who does!) , but we manage first-time validation of our applications a lot more often than not, so contact us if you need advice on the application package required for your particular proposal.

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(also file under: don’t believe everything you read on the internet and the problem with loopholes is that you can hang yourself with them).

Garden room ‘home offices’ are flavour of the month at the moment, with still no end seemingly in sight for Covid lockdown measures.

Almost every manufacturer of off-the-shelf garden rooms will tell you that their designs are compliant with Permitted Development rules, and that you don’t need permission for them.

There are ALL SORTS of potential trip hazards, here, not least that there are confusing differences between the exemptions for Planning and those for Building Regulations, but we’ve just had an example drawn to our attention of another one that often gets missed.

The question was how you measure the heights of such buildings and in THIS CASE (hyperlink to: https://logcabins.co.uk/how-to-measure-the-height-of-a-log-cabin/) the manufacturer is quite right in that the rules say that on sloping ground you’re allowed to measure from the highest pre-existing ground level immediately adjacent to the building.

What they’ve failed to spot is that there is a separate, quite clear rule saying that no outbuilding – no matter what overall height – is acceptable as ‘Permitted Development’ where it would ‘include the construction or provision of a verandah, balcony or raised platform”.

Don’t take anything you’re told by manufacturers and suppliers of these buildings as Gospel truth and before spending £thousands on such a builing, we’d urge you to talk to us about checking your precise circumstances and requirements, and obtaining a ‘Certificate of Lawfulness’  if necessary, to avoid problems further down the line.

Bats have been high on the agenda with a couple of our projects this week, which reminds us that the season for ecology surveys of several species is coming to an end for this year:  bats, dormice, reptiles and even white-clawed crayfish are all getting ready to batten down the hatches for winter.

This can be a problem for Planning, as Local Authorities often aren’t willing to take a decision on applications where ecology might be important, without detailed survey reports.

Sometimes it’s possible to overcome these issues,  either by convincing the Local Authority that there’s no need for a survey in a specific case – as we managed on one of our recent applications – or by arranging something called an ‘Extended Phase 1 Habitat Survey’ as part of a ‘Preliminary Ecological Appraisal’ (PEA). The latter (which can be undertaken all year round) can often persuade the Planners that that at least have enough information to take a decision on an application, leaving more detailed survey work and/or assessment of mitigation measures for later, before actual construction work starts on site.

Let us know if you’ve got a project where wee beasties might be a stumbling block!