Have your say: Building Regulations consultation
Our friends and colleagues in DCLG building control this week launched a consultation on changes to the building regulations regime in England.
The consultation aims to streamline the Building Regulations to save businesses money and deliver safer and more sustainable buildings.
The consultation includes proposals for the next steps to improve the energy efficiency of new homes, to pave the way for the introduction of zero-carbon homes from 2016, and for help with the roll out of the Green Deal this autumn.
More information about the consultation is available on the Portal.
Planning Portal Blog 
We are a small voluntary project in South East London who have been landed with BREEAM which means lots of extra expense for us, some useful but much quite counter-productive. It also means that we have had many volunteers having to spend their time just doing paperwork and liaising with an extremely unhelpful and extremely expensive BREEAM assessor, who is quite clearly, after having an enormous fee from us, putting us off of points which he can’t profit from and trying to steer us towards ones where he can.
His justification for this scheme was that it takes years for building regs to become ‘law’ so this is above building regs to avoid having to go through the proper channels,
Can this be true? either way this scheme is not even rewarding us for fitting sixty solar panels to the roof because of a technicality!
Hi Colin,
I’m sorry but I can’t comment on your case but I wonder if you’ve sought advice or help from your local PlanningAid representative.
If you are a voluntary organisation they should be able to assist.
http://www.rtpi.org.uk/planningaid
Thanks very much, we’ll try that.