All these damn rules controlling every aspect of life!

[Geoffrey]

Che Guavara was better looking (allegedly)

[meow2222]

The main reason our current buildings are so poor is overregulation, for 2 reasons.

1. The excessive regulation has driven prices to many times the free market price, so we cant afford decent. Expalined more further down.

2.. All the creative ideas I came up with: nope, not permitted. Sometimes for fair reason, but in most cases not at all. Too often the regs are leading clearly and drectly to lower quality stock.

Look at our building history before planning. We have a wealth of creative innovative quality buildings from then: but not today. Just about all of our very finest buildings would be illegal to build today! Look at Ben Law's house, a lovely piece, yet it took a vast effort just to get permission to build it. AND it has to be pulled down when he dies. What a farce.

In the 1800s, with nearly zero regulation, anything went, and everything was built. The free market addressed quality issues as usual. Generally the good stuff survives, and the bad is almost entirely erased. The result was the country gradually built up an increasing stock of quality builds.

Realise that today we have way more resources than 100-150 years ago, yet are living in houses of similar quality. Instead of affording much better, we afford the same because the cost has risen excessively.

Today with more resources, more information, and the existence of voluntary quality schemes, the mistakes of the 1800s are simple and easy to avoid. The same process could be done today without the sort of errors made then - not that they were in reality especially problematic.

But today one mostly can not innovate, and one mostly can not afford luxurious touches because the costs of even basic buildings are pushed astronomically high by anal planning laws, illogical building regs, and silliness from start to finish.

Yes there are good reasons for build regs, but they fail in so many ways as to end up being counterproductive. In numerous cases cutting one very trivial corner can bring a gain of far more value than the loss of value entailed. I dont mean occasionally, old houses especially are like this. Time after time improvement work would be seriously beneficial, yet can not be implemented because some completely trivial point doesnt meet current OTT practice.

Not always, no, but our build regs have gone so far that this sort of problem is an every day occurrence, with stupid decisions resulting again and again. Build regs once seemed a good thing, wiping out some poor practices. (This could be done today just as well with todays easy access to information.) But they seem to have forgotten their purpose, and now be leading us by the nose, making building today very much more costly, causing problems routinely, and preventing most competent diyers from constructing their own houses, a process which in itself is not especially difficult.

Build regs fail to take this weighing up, or putting into perspective, into account in any way, stopping serious improvements over trivial non-issues. Theyre fair enough as a quality benchmark for new builds, a standard that may be met when chosen, but not fine as a requirement for new houses, where they can escalate costs unnecessarily, and prevent self build, and they are hopelessly inappropriate when applied to improvements of older houses. For example it is common to find one would have to demolish an existing 70s/80s 1 storey bathroom extension to add an extra room on top, because the rules on foundations require deeper. Even though the existnig extension migth have foundations measured in feet, while the whole road full of original houses, all in good condition, have only 13" foundations. BRs just dont make good sense far too often.

Dont even get me started on the requirement for sockets high up even on

3rd floor flats, paper pushing just to replace your hot water tank, the requirement to draughtproof then add ventilation, the requirement for DPCs based on dodgy science, the requirement for deep foundations instead of lime mortar, the upcoming requirement to air pressure test houses, ad nauseam.

In a free market there would be competing standards companies, each with its own set of requirements and inspectors, and buyers could choose what they wanted, or specify for themselves if they wish. With todays level of comms technology this is easy to do. There would also be much less restricitve planning, the end result of these being that first time buyers would see prices nosedive, and those with more in the bank would be able to afford some very nice houses, instead of another small airtight box.

We're now unhappy about our legal right being taken away to do our own plumbing, for reasons that really make no sense, but rarely is it mentioned we've lost the basic human right to build (and improve) our own house. If we wound the clock back 100 years, most of us on this group would have done exactly that, built our house, just as we want it. How many of you would like to be able to extend, yet are prevented from doing so? How many would like to build a 2nd house on the property, but cant? How many here would rather have bought land and built for 6 months, at a fraction of the cost, than pay through the nose for 25 years for a restricted houses on restricted land?

Rip-off Britain is a term each of us earns by working 25 years just to buy a house. Even Africa has 8-10 year mortgages!

NT

[Geoffrey]

Oh

My

God

[andy hall]

Some kind of rectangular frame fitted in front of the teeth. Must be a fashion accessory.

[andy hall]

What did you want?

[DJC]

Yes she did say that but, you need to consider its context, if you take it as indicative of her values. It was said as a counter to the view all too common at the time that 'society was to blame' that the ills of the world were to be fixed by government, 'society', or anyone but the individual, their family and friends. Yes, today the sense of society as a community of people with a common purpose, interests, and values is often lacking. But 'society' in the sense of busybody governments, and lobby groups, and corporations and guilds, all promoting their own self interest in the name of it being for your own good, is all too prevalent. Which brings us back to the original subject of this thread.

[Chris Bacon]

Wallace & Grommet?

[Doctor Drivel]

What strange logic.

You are making this up.

Check the regs. A BCO will have his pet hates. If it is within the regs and they say no, then ask them to give it to you chapter and verse. If you know you are "definitely" within regs, and he opposes, then spell it out on paper and proceed. The BCO is not God.

Name some.

Insulated blocks: Sweden TJI I beams: USA SIP panels: USA Art Deco Design: France Advanced modern architecture: Germany (Bau Haus)

You forget the Victorian crap that was pulled down. Only the best survived. The term Jerry Built comes from a Victorian construction company, Jerry Bros.

The Brits did do the first iron framed glass curtain walled building: Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, 1864.

That is planning, not Building regs. Increase checks on quality of construction and we all benefit.

And lots fell down. I did a search and thjis came up:

The free market addressed quality issues as

It never, it just promoted greed. Building control should be increased to prevent shoddy workmanship, which the UK is famed, and planning totally relaxed. The free market and solve the housing problem, not the quality problem.

The quality of the existing housing stock is abysmal. Much needs demolishing right now.

The UK is backwards in technology. This is mainly because of the land being in the hands of the few and 80% of homes built by about 20 companies. We need to build 466,000 homes per ann.

The following text is taken from a short article by James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting & Innovation at de Montfort University and author of "Why is construction so backward ?". The data being drawn from The Office of National Statistics.

"In Britain 57.5m people live in about 24m dwellings. If household growth is to match population growth, 64m people will, by 2030, need a stock of 26.7m homes. But households are getting smaller, so call that 2030 total for homes

29m - five million more homes than exist in Britain in 2005.

Then there is the rate of stock replacement. Today, ordinary flats or houses will just about last 100 years - given lots of refurbishment and DIY. So take it that, over the next 25 years, Britain will need to replace, on a

100-year cycle, stock that rises from 24m to 29m units. That means building an additional 242,000 new homes in 2006, racking up to 290,000 in 2030. Over 25 years, therefore, 6.65m new homes will be needed just to replace worn-out old ones. Add the 200,000 homes required for annual new household formation to the average of 266,000 required for annual stock replacement and one gets an annual output of 466,000 homes -11.65m over 25 years. That's a little different from the annual average of 171,225 homes built in Britain since 1997.

Wouldn't the millions of new homes we propose concrete over Britain's green and pleasant land? Wouldn't they mean, at the very least, still more urban sprawl? It's time to lay these myths to rest. The land cover of Great Britain is 23.5m hectares, used in 2002 as follows:

1. intensive agricultural land - 10.8m hectares, or 45.96 per cent
2. semi-natural land - 7.0m hectares, or 29.78 per cent
3. woodland - 2.8m hectares, or 11.91 per cent
4. settled land accounts for 1.8m hectares, or 7.65 per cent
5. water bodies - 0.3m hectares, or 1.28 per cent
6. sundry other categories - 0.8m hectares, or 3.42 per cent.

If settlements are added to the `sundry' component (largely transport infrastructure such as roads and railways), then built-up Great Britain consists of about 2.3m hectares, or just 10 per cent of the land available. Clearly, considerable growth in both population and household numbers can be accommodated - both in high urban concentrations, and as dispersed settlements integrated into the landscape."

I think an increase of about 40% or so to accomadate future population growth is a bit steep, when currently only 7.65% of the land is settled. Nevertheless, I like then way he destroys the the concreting over the countyside myth.

Read some of the articles here:

Yes there are good reasons for build regs,

It is not perfect, but to imply to roll back BC is madness. Have a look at the shoddy developer Estates going up. Better still look at the blockwork and the cavities filled with 6" of cement. hey get plasterers in to cover the lot up.

It is clear you understanding of this limited.

You can still do that. many do.

One the best regs to come out is pressure testing. It ensures the quality in the building of the fabric is stop on.

You really don't know.

We have lost the basic right to build a house where we want to (within reason of course) . No one is stopping you renovating.

Yep.

Depends on if you want to be right up to someone's window.

[Doctor Drivel]

Matt, you can't be three people all at once: Matt, Lord Hall and now God. You have got to get professional help.

[John Cartmell]

I was dealing with the strikes, layoffs, &c in the North West. I *know* what was really behind the tabloid headlines and I know where they were (deliberately) wrong.

[John Cartmell]

People were fed up of tightening their belts - getting the raging inflation down without damaging industry or people is hard. And Thatcher promised much reduced unemployment which was slowly creeping up to 1million. And the Liberals left the coalition/alliance to gain political advantage and the tabloids swooped on strikes by low paid workers and whooped it up.

It was necessary - try reading the 'White-hot Technology' speech of Harold Wilson in Glasgow. No one questioned the need. The problem was that most of the shake-up was required in management and the Labour government wanted to do it without irreparable harm to industry or workers. It could have been done but had to be done slowly and carefully or it wouldn't work. Only a blithering idiot would have (let's get the DIY ideas in!) pulled the house down in order to sort out bad old plastering - and blame it on the wallpaper! Part of the reconstruction would come from the income from North Sea Oil. Instead that was used to pay for high unemployment levels designed to destroy industry.

Thatcher's idea was that if the statistics showed that, at any one time, 30% of hospital beds were empty then you could close 30% of hospitals. She didn't appreciate that by trying to get 100% hospital beds full you had people lying in hospital corridors for days and endemic disease. She didn't appreciate that industry employed people who weren't particularly bright to do mundane work. She wanted such people out. Out where? Out on the streets drawing benefit that the rest of us, and industry, had to pay for instead of making the best use of their capabilities and making them a useful part of society.

[John Cartmell]

I'm very glad you asked that question. I was finding them *real* jobs in industry and - in most cases - with a small element of continued training over the following 6 months.

However: I also worked with those who were given 'training/work' during the Thatcher years and that was a totally different matter where (one real example that I dealt with myself) a group of six 20-somethings were removed from the unemployment statistics by forming a 'band'. They had to show that they were gainfully self-employed and had capital. Each of them showed a photocopy of a cheque for 1000 GBP from the mother of one of them. The same photocopy for all six of them. The cheque was never cashed and there never was 1000 GBP in her account anyway. The group got together once. On the strength of that they were not required to sign-on or look for work, were each paid a top-up support income to get their 'business' going (the sum was more than the unemployment benefit would have been for each of them) - but most importantly were taken off the unemployment register for a year. I dealt with them at the end of the year.

When I say that the Thatcher unemployment statistics were fraudulent, I know what I'm talking about.

[John Cartmell]

Are you forgetting the people who lived at eg 22 Back Blacow Street Preston - but only because falling income for hand-loom weavers (down by two-thirds) in the 1830s forced them to move out from the fresh air of Ribchester? Would you really like to return to non-regulation? Just because some of the houses that were built at the time - that my g'g'g'grandfather couldn't afford to live in anyway - have survived OK doesn't mean that there was anything good about non-regulation.

If you have any doubt I could give you a detailed description of life in a non-regulation house.

[Tony Bryer]

The market determines what houses sell for. When bid for sites their bid is (in simple terms) ultimate sales - (building costs + other costs

• required profit). So if you increase building standards you reduce the amount developers are willing to pay for land and at the margin Mr X decides not to sell to a developer after all.

When you look at overregulation by HMG you are only seeing half the picture. With few exceptions you cannot build and sell a new house without NHBC or equivalent certification and back in my BCO days NHBC had rules for all sorts of things that fell outside or were more onerous than Bulding Regs including minimum foundation depths near trees,compulsory treatment of roof timbers, minimum numbers of power sockets, finishings etc. Someone who has a copy of the NHBC current standards can expand on this list no doubt.

[Geoffrey]

Personally, I believe she did appreciate it, she just didn't care.

[Doctor Drivel]

You keep saying this. and it is partially true. Housing is rigged in the UK. An artificial land shortage is created distorting house prices.

What we need is little regulation on where you can build and more regulation on building standards and quality.

[David]

In article , Doctor Drivel writes

So its not unemployment at all then, just a skills mismatch?, I can see why you're a nu labour supporter

[meow2222]

am not familiar with the address unfortunately. There was a lot of very poor housing in Victorian times, and I believe I addressed that question.

Firstly the financial situation is very different today, and we can afford safe functional minimum standards. This is what housing regs initially were. But they have mission crept a long way from that now.

Second, information is free flowing enough to permit widespread use of independant standards companies for those who want better stadards than basic. NHBC is one such organisation, not one I'd especially recommend, but it does have certain standards and meansures for redress. Its a fairly poor example, but its one standards option for buyers. If our current regs were trimmed back to what is required, more such standards companies would set up, including at least one that works to the current national BRs.

Differing sets of standards would allow each new buyer to choose according to their desires and budget, with safe and functional building practice carried out in every case.

The array of standards would permit quicker open assessment of options, and democratically chosen shifts in what standards are used. As an example, the mandating of whole house RCDs would have been part of some companies standards, rather than a nationwide requirement. The requirement for 6' deep foundations on a 1 storey bathroom added to a stable Victorian 9" founded building would again be part of some companies standards, but not all. With the free flow of information today, prospective buyers could easily either find out the merits and issues with each company, or choose to simply go with a large well known brand name. Or, if they have sufficient understanding of the issues themselves, they would be free to specify what they wanted, if they wanted.

that much is fairly obvious.

Uncoincidentally I lived in one for 9 months or so, and am glad I was fortunate enough to do so. It was very basic, had a steel roof, and enabled me to save up lots of money, which at the time was precisely what I wanted. It really opened my eyes to this whole question to some extent. Its an experience I'm fortunate to have had. It has eliminated those illfounded fears most people today in Britain have.

As I said, the mistakes of the Victorian period are easy to avoid today. What is I think not so well appreciated is that all the complicating attempts to avoid minor issues today are ending up costing us far more than living with the minor issues that were part of the middle ground of Victorian buildings.

Lets say - and this is only a finger in the air for the moment, due to the difficulty of putting exact figuers on it - I could buy a new build in todays system for 200k, and work full time for 25 year paying it off

- paying aruond 400k in total due to interest over a long time. Or, under the approach I suggest, I could buy the land for 30k, spend 6 months full time constructing my own house, for material cost of maybe another 30k, and incur total additional downline costs of up to 5k in maintenance/repair as a result. Now thats a total cost of 60 upfront, 5 downline, as opposed to 200 upfront, and will take me _less_ than 1/3 the time to pay off. I need hardly ask which is the better way to buy a house!

Nor need I ask what numerous improvements in quality I could afford to incorporate at those prices.

House building is a process clogged to near standstill by our current level of regulation. For most of us on this ng our housebuilding plans are stopped dead. For commercial builders they have to jump through so many hoops that prices are truly excessive.

It all stems from the modern fashion for naivety and simplicity, the expectation and desire for perfectly issue free lives. We have invested so much in the quest for better housing that it has ended up costing us out of all proportion to the initial problem. It has ended up causing a far bigger cost problem than it is solving. Todays cure is worse than the disease of imperfect housing. The cure is 5x the cost of the problem.

Just ask yourself why we live in houses similar to 100 years ago, despite the huge leaps in material wealth that have ben made since then. Our housing policies are so inappropriate they keep us stuck some ways in the Victorian era. The cart is now before the horse.

Drivel is right about planning and land ownership, if nothing else.

NT

[David]

Yes, "same trough, different pigs"

[David]

Which ones?