The Natural House?

Good to see that The Natural House is open. At last. As far as I recall, it was meant to be up and running for BRE's Onsite 09 exhibition, but it had run into a few problems. I think the original builders went bust and it took a while to sort out a replacement crew. On time, on budget, it isn't. But is it on message?

I haven't seen it in its finished state (your roving reporter having temporarily stopped roving) but judging by Hattie Hartman's Footprint piece, I am puzzled by what point it's trying to make. The conclusion I am drawn to make is that this is a right-wing house, sitting in a small estate (OK Innovation Park) of left-wing houses. It is also a vocal house, making a statement about its political credentials. "I'm different and I don't care who knows it. Something 'bout me is not the same."

Enter Grant Shapps, our Housing Minister, who was on hand to open the house. Note it's red tape he is cutting, not blue ribbon!

Very symbolic. His quote is also illuminating. Shapps said ‘delivering zero carbon was beginning to look quite alien and not synonymous with traditional looking homes. . . Natural House demonstrates that British design will still have a place on our streets and does not need to be replaced by Scandinavian-style, ‘eco-bling’ properties that wear their green credentials for all to see’.

Now hold on Grant. One thing at a time. Firstly, is this really what anyone would call "British Design." I'm really not sure. Although it's four square, faintly Georgian, it's also nothing like anything I have seen anywhere in the world. If you were to show me a picture of this house without knowing where or what it is, and had asked me to guess where it was, I think I would go for Germany, probably because the windows look German (in fact they are Austrian, quite close). I'm not even sure what a modern British house design looks like.

By implication, Shapps seems to be implying that the other houses on the BRE Innovation Park look Scandinavian, but once again I'm not sure that really holds water. One or two maybe - indeed one of them is Scandinavian IIRC. But mostly they look.....left-wing methinks. Or modern. I guess Scandinavia is pretty left wing. Certainly has very high public spending levels. Not to mention suicide levels - how existential can you get? There is a point to be teased out here, but I'm not sure it's Britain v Scandinavia.

Then there's the eco-bling comment. One of the things that the Natural House eschews is eco-bling, which is the derogatory term used for solar panels in particular, but also for all the various accoutrements which the government currently gives us subsidies for (i.e. heat pumps, biomass boilers, CHP plants, i.e. small scale renewables generally). Although the Natural House is not a PassivHaus, it's making much the same points — i.e. you don't need eco-bling, you just need to build it properly. No whether this is a left v right, modern v traditional battle, I have no idea, but it's a point to which I pretty much subscribe. Maybe that makes me right-wing?

The manifesto for the Natural House includes using not only "natural" materials but ones that can be sourced in the UK and ones that can be purchased off the shelf. Which shelf, it doesn't say? Harrods anyone? Eagle-eyed readers will already have spotted that the windows came from Austria (despite Howarth Timber now making them in Lincolnshire), but it also uses Thermoplan clay blocks for the walls (Germany), Pavaroof (Switzerland), Aereco ventilation (France), lots of timber (anywhere but the UK). At least the foundations (Bullivants) and the roof cover (Sandtoft) are British, plus much of the chintzy fit out.

And how is it heated? Hattie doesn't tell us. Nor does any of the other literature I can lay my hands on. It's certainly no post-heated MVHR system because it doesn't have an MVHR system - it relies on Aereco's passive stack system instead. Certainly won't be a heat pump. can't be a gas boiler? Can it? My guess is that it's some infernal biomass boiler, hidden away in the servants quarters. I bet you it's made nearer to Scandinavia than the UK! (But I won't mention eco-****).

So we are getting close to the knitty gritty of what this house is all about here. It shares a fabric-first approach with the PassivHaus — incidentally there is as yet no PassivHaus on the BRE Innovation Park — but it sets itself out as being diametrically opposed to the PassivHaus airtight/MVHR approach. Because? Well, it's not altogether clear. I guess because it's "unnatural". But they have in fact — according to the score sheet — built an amazingly airtight house with a score of just 1q50, which only narrowly fails the PassivHaus standard (0.6q50). That's an awfully tight score for a house with no MVHR and it will be interesting to see how it performs, especially if there is to be wood-burning appliances as well. My guess is it will struggle - or else there are vent holes which will be used to let extra air in which simply got closed off for the pressure test. Something doesn't add up here.

You see, if you go really airtight, you more or less have to install MVHR. I know some people disagree (Bill Dunster?), but the consensus of opinion is that if you construct something resembling an aircraft cabin, then you need to have a fan to change the air. Maybe someone, somewhere on some distant university campus will spend years testing ventilation systems and airtightness levels to get a conclusive answer to all this, but at the moment it's an unknown and MVHR is much the simplest way of dealing with this unresolved issue.

So why make a stand against using MVHR? Is it because it's eco-****? Is it because it's not natural? Is it because it doesn't breathe? (Give us a break, please!) Is it because it's left wing? Or Scandinavian? Is it because we like chimneys? But if we like chimneys, why bother to build to such low air tightness levels? And why does this blog keep ending with a series or questions?

On Welsh Slate

Alan Smith, MD of Welsh Slate, had invited me to take a look around the famous Penrhyn slate quarry.

I got there at last on Tuesday and was immediately bowled over by the place. The scale — it's enormous. The location — it's dramatic, perched up on a mountainside at the edge of Snowdonia. The history — it's all pervasive and a little disquieting. Penrhyn has been operating for hundreds of years so comes with the feel of an industrial museum piece. But there are still hundreds of years worth of unworked seams lying in the ground, so it remains an incredibly important resource. And one which I slowly came to realise is both underused and undervalued.

My knowledge of the UK roofing market is fairly limited. Back in my days as a jobbing builder in Cambridge, we regularly used to do re-roofs of the Victorian housing and we always used to search out Welsh reclaims. This was in the 1980s, at a time when Spanish slates were just starting to appear in number. Reclaims you could buy for a similar amount but were by and large a better bet than the Spanish ones. Thinking about it, that in itself is pretty amazing, because these reclaims had already spent the best part of a century up on a roof, and they were still in pretty good nick. It was easy to test them. You just tapped the back of the slate with a hammer and if it gave a nice hollow ringing sound, it was a good'un. In a good batch, only about 5% were rejected. Any building product with a 95% recycling rate after 100 years has got to be pretty special, but back then we just took it for granted. In contrast, many of the imported slates were prone to cracking or splitting when being nailed on the battens.

Back then, we never went for new Welsh slate because there was no need. It was always said to be "too expensive" so we just went with what everybody else used, which was reclaims.

But I never really put 2 + 2 together before this week. There is a very good reason why new Welsh slate is "too expensive" and that is because after 100 years it is still better than most slate from other quarries around the world. And that's not an idle boast, it's pretty much down to the geology of Penrhyn. The slate hewn from this seam is a lot older than the competition (geoglogically, it's Cambrian) and because of this it has far fewer impurities. Consequently, it is harder and it barely degrades. It can sit on a roof, go through whatever sun, wind,rain and snow can throw at it for year after year and it barely has any effect on it at all. Thinking back on it, the roofs we were relaying in the 1980s were being relaid because the supporting timber was knackered and the slates were starting to slip. It wasn't the slates themselves which were at fault.

Even today, 100 yr old reclaimed Welsh slate is available to buy at around £28/m2: new Penrhyn slate costs around £50/m2, so this is a building product that holds 60% of its value for a century. Can you think of anything else to match this? In terms of whole life costing, it's an astonishing result. And looking at things this way, I realised this week for the first time that new Welsh slate isn't "expensive" at all. It's actually one of the biggest bargains out there.

By the end of my brief visit, I had become an advocate. In an era when everyone and their aunt is banging on about sustainable building materials, here is one that's produced on our doorstep, that lasts several lifetimes, looks fantastic, there's masses of it, and it requires almost no energy to produce. There's no baking, no firing, no moulding with cement, no manufacturing at all. Just sawing away from the rockface, cutting, splitting and finishing, much of this still done by hand because no one has yet invented a machine which can improve on the human eye. Go check it out.

The Green Belt - a very Tory problem

I have been dipping into a draft of the forthcoming National Planning Policy Framework (the NPPF) which is taxiing for take-off sometime in the not-too-distant-future (OK - I actually have no idea when). The NPPF sets out to streamline and simplify all the various national planning guidances (the PPGs and PPSs) into one document. This first draft will get re-written and then go out to consultation and in time it will become the business. In England only — planning being a devolved matter.

Now I must declare a small interest here because I am currently well involved with another consultation exercise going on in the world of selfbuild, where various noteworthies and practitioners are sitting in smoke-free rooms trying to come up with suggestions for housing minister Grant Shapps to make selfbuild easier and more mainstream. You can't sit for very long in a smoke-free room talking about selfbuild without the topic of planning coming up — in fact it sort of pervades pretty much all the discussions.

So if you like, the draft NPPF document is homework for me. It's certainly not the sort of thing I would be reading for pleasure. But it's not badly written and I must quietly admit to enjoying the odd moment. The thing that strikes me most about it, and the bit I am getting around to, is the fact that despite it being a new document, all the old planning speak is still in place, and all the old contradictions are there to be examined, and put back in the box.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the battle between housing supply and Green Belt. Here's what this document says about housing supply objectives:

The Government’s key housing objective is to significantly increase the delivery of new homes. Everyone should have the opportunity to live in high quality, well designed homes, which they can afford, in a community where they want to live. To achieve this objective, the Government is seeking to:

␣ significantly increase the supply of housing;
␣ deliver a wide choice of high quality homes that people want and need;
␣ widen opportunities for home ownership; and
␣ create sustainable, inclusive and mixed communities in all areas, including through the regeneration and renewal of areas of poor housing.

To enable this, the planning system should aim to deliver a sufficient quantity, quality and range of housing consistent with the land use principles and other polices of this National Planning Policy Framework.

It all sounds very pro-housing until you get halfway through the last sentence, the bit that starts "consistent with...". Ask yourself which is more important. Housing supply? Or land use principles? I think the phrase consistent with tells you that it's land use principles which rule the roost.

And for land use principles, you can read protection, and for this you can read Green Belt. Here's what the same document has to say about Green Belt.

The Government attaches great importance to Green Belts. The fundamental aim of Green Belt policy is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open; the essential characteristics of Green Belts are their openness and their permanence.

Green Belt serves five purposes:
␣ to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
␣ to prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another;
␣ to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
␣ to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
␣ to assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.

Once Green Belts have been defined, local authorities should plan positively to enhance the beneficial use of the Green Belt, such as looking for opportunities to provide access; provide opportunities for outdoor sport and recreation; retain and enhance landscapes and biodiversity; or improve damaged and derelict land.

Take another look at the first sentence. The fundamental aim of the Green Belt is to prevent urban sprawl. Urban sprawl? You can't help but stand back here and think, firstly, what the hell is urban sprawl and, secondly, who would give a shit about urban sprawl. It then goes on to list five supplementary reasons why we should be worried about urban sprawl.

The one I like best is the prevention of neighbouring towns merging into one another, as if this is a way of stopping the transmission of infectious diseases. We have the horrors of the Medway towns, and Bournemouth and Poole staring us in the face, as these coalescences had occurred before the Green Belt policies got to work. How much worse could it have got? If it wasn't for these policies, upmarket Cheltenham might even now have been swallowed up by Gloucester (tabloid) City.

In fact, the more you read these justifications for Green Belt, the quainter they sound. And the killer sentence is of course the last one. Here it is again. For emphasis sake.

local authorities should plan positively to enhance the beneficial use of the Green Belt, such as looking for opportunities to provide access; provide opportunities for outdoor sport and recreation; retain and enhance landscapes and biodiversity; or improve damaged and derelict land.


Now access, outdoor sport and biodiversity are all very well and good, but the country isn't exactly short of any of these.

So how can a planning policy make out that on the one hand housing supply should be increased significantly whilst, on the other, the obvious location for this new housing supply is off limits and can only be used for access, outdoor sport and bird watching? Who says? Who exactly comes up with this planning theory? And how come someone doesn't point out that it doesn't make any sense?

Now for many years, some of our more subversive commentators have put a very different interpretation on these policies. The last to nail his colours to the mast was the undercover economist Tim Harford. Harford argued that the Green Belt exists largely to protect the status quo and to maintain high property prices in English villages in particular. By preventing the expansion of villages, the Green Belt acts as an Economic Cleanser, and the poor eventually get shunted out into the urban social housing estates that the Green Belt actually encourages. My recent straw polls of planning-type people who I have been canvassing suggest that the Harford line is broadly accepted, and that the "urban sprawl" justifications used in planning policy documents are there pretty much as window dressing.

Not that there aren't a lot of people around who think the Green Belt is and should remain sacrosant. Here's what history lecturer, TV pundit and now a Labour MP Tristram Hunt had to say about it in 2008 (quoted in Daily Telegraph) "Of course our green belt is sacred. The alternative is a car-dependent, exurban sprawl disfiguring our towns and villages, worsening climate change, leeching cities into wilderness and doing nothing to bring down the cost of housing."

Not only is this mostly a load of bollocks, it's dishonest bollocks, esp the last bit about the cost of housing. That's having your cake and eating it. My point is that you can build in the countryside, or you can have fields in the countryside and high house prices, but you can't have both.

Which brings us to the Tories because here is a political party that actively wants both. The countryside is pretty much Tory heartland and rural Tories don't like voting for new housing development (because they like to hang on to what they have got). Despite the Green Belt originally being a Socialist-inspired idea, it's the rural Tories who will now be fighting hardest for its retention.

Housebuilder's Bible - 9th edition - missing table

The 9th edition has now been on the shelves (well on Amazon's shelf at least) for just over a month and is selling well. And signs are that it's getting read as well because two eagle-eyed readers have spotted the fact that in Chapter 8 (Plumbing & Heating) I refer in the text to a table that isn't there. I can only apologise: it somehow got lost in the changeover between editions. The reason is that the 9th edition features a benchmark house without a conventional heating system and so there are no conventional heating costs to table. But I didn't mean to leave out the conventional heating costs - they just got overlooked.

So for readers scratching their heads, here is the data that should have been in Chapter 8.

Key Materials Prices
Gas Condensing Boiler and Flue £ 650
Gas Condensing Combi Boiler £ 850
Oil Condensing Boiler and Flue £ 1,400
Mains Pressure Cylinder £ 600
Primaries/Valves/Pumps £ 300
Radiator and Pipework £ 65
Heating Controls/wiring £ 200
TRVs £ 8
Room Thermostats £ 60
Devi Heat Mats £ 12 /m2
UFH pipe inc manifolds £ 10 /m2
Unbunded Oil Tank £ 400
Bunded Oil Tank £ 1,200

Plumbers rates £ 30/hr Cost@ £30/hr
Fit Boiler + Balanced Flue 10 hr £ 300
Fit Cylinder 6 hr £ 180
Fit Tanks in Loft 6 hr £ 180
Run Cold to Loft 2 hr £ 60
Connect Primary Pipework 8 hr £ 240
Fix one radiator 0.5 hr £ 15
Pipe radiator 1 hr £ 30
Fit Whole House Heating Control 6 hr £ 180
Fit Individual Room Stats 2 hr £ 60
Commission System 8 hr £ 240
Place and Plumb-in Oil Tank 6 hr £ 180
Lay underfloor heating 10 mins/m2 £ 5

Harnessing the energy of the DIY army

In recent weeks, I've given over some time to helping out Nasba (that's the National Selfbuild Association) by engaging with the government in a consultation exercise to see if we can somehow push selfbuild up the planners' agenda, and to make life easier for amateur builders. Whilst major housebuilders have long been represented in the corridors of power by professional lobbyists, the selfbuild community, by its very nature, is fragmented and transitory and has been neglected in discussions about the national housing mix.

That this discussion is taking place at all is due in large part to two people, one being Ted Stevens, the driving force behind Nasba, the other Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister. Somehow selfbuild seems to fit in with all these coalition buzzwords we keep hearing like Localsim and the Community Right to Build (or CRTB as I heard it abbrvd. to), and bodies hoping to speak up for the "typical selfbuilder" are currently being welcomed with open arms at both the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and No 10.

At Ted's behest, I am chairing one of four committees tasked with coming up with ways of improving the selfbuilder's lot. My group is looking at the many regulatory hurdles facing amateur developers. This is definitely my big society moment because the fee for all this work is a big fat nothing - not even travel expenses - and my hope is, consequently, that this all doesn't take too long. We've been promised some sort of outcome by July. Let's hope so, because the thrill of sitting in Elland House, home of the Department, with a security name tag around my neck and a cheap day return in my pocket won't last long.

On March 28, I attended a gathering of the committee chairmen together with key DCLG bods to review where we had go to so far, and whilst there was lots of encouraging words spouting forth, we also came bang slap up against a little semantic problem which quietly rankles away in the background and from time to time rears its ugly head. That is how exactly do you define "selfbuild." Where do you draw the line? It sort of matters when you are trying to engage with agencies wanting to promote selfbuild, especially if the term starts appearing in planning guidance documents, which is something we all hope will happen.

So why is selfbuild hard to define? Well, there is the classic selfbuilder, the type who turns up at the Homebuilding & Renovating or Grand Designs shows, who has a plot and wants to know how to build a house. Then there's a small number of hardy souls who get together to do group selfbuild, some private, some as affordable schemes. There are also professional builders who build regularly for sale and sometimes build for their own occupation, and there are amateurs who become serial selfbuilders and sort of graduate into professionals. Statistically, these guys are selfbuilders but they don't really belong in spirit. Then there are converters and restorers. And there are lots of people who have homes that they want to improve and can't decide what to do with them: should they renovate or rebuild? To them, it's often a very tricky decision, but one thing they never consider is their status as selfbuilders or not. To them, it's just getting building work done whichever way suits.

And then it struck me that the very term "selfbuilder" has been defined by others, not by selfbuilders. It's not a term widely used in other countries and I don't think it was much used in this country until the 1990s. The reason we have a sub-group of house builders called selfbuilders is that we have a much larger group of professional or speculative builders, and it's the very dominance of this group which makes selfbuild appear to be something of an anomaly in need of a leg up.

What's peculiar about the housebuilding market in Britain is the dominance of spec builders. In the UK, the big builders do deals in smoke-filled rooms with landowners and planners and carve up the countryside into mega-plots, and then serve up whatever they choose to build. It doesn't really happen in other Western nations where the consumer has remained in pole position and builders have customised their output to fit consumer choice. Countries like Germany have a very different housing market where individual plots are quite easy to locate and develop, and the housebuilders compete for their custom, just like a kitchen or bathroom company does over here. There is no notion of selfbuilding in Germany, anymore than someone in the UK who orders a new kitchen is a self-kitchener.

So if we are really going to make selfbuilding much more commonplace over here, then we have to do something to address the dominance of the spec builders (i.e. stop it). I'm not sure this is the message that Grant Shapps really wants to hear, because so much of the policy debate is dominated by numbers, and there is a feeling that if the Coalition doesn't get loads more new homes built then its housing policies will have failed. My worry is that they are looking to boost selfbuild simply as a way of providing additional new homes, not because it is as an alternative and superior procurement route.

And in seeking to harness selfbuild as a way of simply adding to the number of new homes being built, the government may be missing a trick, because what we are dealing with here is a pretty basic human desire to build a nice nest. Whether that's building a new home or extending and improving an old one is not a central issue to this DIY army. And, if you think about it logically, it's not central to the wider issue of our housing stock. Too much effort is being expended on making the cake bigger: not enough on checking out whether it still tastes OK.

Time to redefine competence?

Last Sunday, I was working an "Expert" at the Homebuilding & Renovating show and I got asked a question which set me thinking. First the question.

A guy is planning to build a house and he hates trickle vents, but he also doesn't want to use mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. His preferred window maker produces a window with a vent-open setting which he is happy with, but he has heard that this doesn't meet with British building regs. Is that right and, if so, what are his options?

It's a good question and it's not the first time I have been asked it. The ventilation regs - Part F - aren't exactly black and white on this issue but they make it difficult for people wanting to use the ventilation or night latch solution because they are required to demonstrate that the ventilation is controlled. Or, to be more precise, that the opening is not too big and not too small. A figure of 5000mm2 per room is bandied about as if this is the key - any less and you will suffocate, any more and you will be wasting energy. Whilst trickle vents are thus routinely manufactured for UK joinery firms to provide this opening (i.e. they are built to the regs), foreign manufacturers don't build with British regs in mind and therefore don't provide any information on their ventilation opening sizes. Hence they run into problems with Part F.

Now whether this is really a matter of public health, or a sneaky way of keeping Continental joinery manufacturers out of the UK market is a matter of debate which I won't dwell on here. My guess is that the more relaxed type of building inspector will be happy to accept the Continental solution, but the sticklers will throw the rule book at you and won't play ball. They will want a 5000mm2 (and not a mm2 less) opening or whole house MVHR, and nothing else will do.

Which brings me onto my main point. Why should this arbitrary power rest with the building inspector? The guidance in Part F has been written deliberately fuzzy so as allow a little leeway in interpretation, and yet the building inspector still gets to act as judge and jury on the outcome.

Which in turn brings me onto the issue of competence. As the building regs have grown ever more complex (and some would say intrusive), the power of the building inspector has slowly ebbed away. First, the role became subject to private competition, so that we now have different building control bodies with slightly different interpretations of the rules. Nowhere is this more pronounced than the world of multifoils where the TRADA-backed claims are now rejected by the establishment building control bodies (LABC, NHBC) but are happily waived through by many small private inspectors.

Secondly, areas of building regulation supervision have been removed from traditional building inspectors and placed in the hands of "competent professionals." Here we are talking about gas plumbing, glazing, electrics, boiler installation, solid fuel, SAP calculations, maybe even a few more I can't think of at the moment. The reason for this is mostly one of cost. Whilst the ambit of the building regs has expanded, the money available for their policing hasn't, so there simply aren't enough inspectors around to check every replacement window or boiler. So schemes like FENSA (for windows) and HETAS (for solid fuel appliances) have been created to supervise and sign off the work.

Can you see where this is heading? If we can accept private building inspectors, and if we can accept areas of the building regs that just get signed off as having been done competently by some bod in a van who has been on a course, why not go the whole hog and have suitably qualified builders and architects who can sign off entire buildings as "meets current building regs?"

Now this isn't a new suggestion. It was looked at in 1999 by the pre-cursor of the DCLG and "there was no support at that time for self-certification for whole buildings." But perhaps they didn't ask the right people? Or maybe professional practices baulk at the thought of the added liability of taking on all this extra responsibility. But it's hard to escape the logic and in an era of cuts, it's probably the way of the future. Afterall, surgeons don't have operation inspectors passing their every move, so why should competent builders or architects?


How would it work, such a system? Well big practices would probably hire redundant building inspectors to become part of the design team to keep everything tickety-boo and up to date. Smaller ones might still use the existing system, or hire in professionals as and when needed. There would have to be a spot-checking system in place (obviously) but there might also be the freedom to negotiate outcomes with clients, rather than the checkbox mentality which pervades the whole process at the moment. So if our trickle-vent hating selfbuilder wanted to use a Continental solution, he could do so on the understanding that it might be deemed to be non-standard and might effect the resale value of his house.

One area where I feel it could make a vast improvement is in the handling of listed building consents. At the moment, these get snagged up for ever and a day by conservation officers who are able to play God with what you can and can't do to a listed building, without so much as a nod towards cost or time. I'm frequently hearing of listed building projects being delayed by up to a year by the machinations of sometimes dubiously-qualified officials who find it very easy to say "No" to almost anything. Why not let the architects or builders take the same courses and get a similar qualification and then let them decide with the client how best to sympathetically restore a listed building?

Competence. It's all in that word. Perhaps it's time for our building professionals to step up to the plate and demand that they be treated like they have it.