Fabrick Talks - Building a Better Future with CABE

Fabrick Talks - Building a Better Future with CABE
#WeAreFabrick

___ Video Content Chapters ___
0:00 - Introduction
00:04 - About Dr. Gavin Dunn and CABE
01:07 - Can the housing sector meet the Net-Zero challenges?
03:05 - Accepting sustainability cost
04:15 - Breaking the human cycle of judging cost benefits
05:01 - Review on 2021 Part L loophole
07:56 - Closing the performance gap - as designed to as-built
13:00 - Why is unhealthy still happening and how to address them?
16:34 - Part O and Part S wholistic approaches
18:20 - Single biggest challenge we will face in the future
20:02 - Thank you by David Ing

_____ Some parts of the Video Transcript _____
CABE is the Chartered Association of Building Engineers and we are one of the professional bodies, very much from the UK tradition of learned professional societies by a royal charter full member of the engineering council and we represent and help demonstrate the competence of members who are quite a unique group of people that work across the life cycle of buildings and across the supply chains within the construction industry but all who undertake very specific technical roles around the application of technology or standards. So, that's what we call 'building engineering' and we see it's a great opportunity to really drive
standards and performance of the built environment.

Look, it's a challenge and it's probably going as fast as we can go, but as I often say to a number of people, it is a necessary journey and it doesn't really matter which metric you look at, whether it is climate change, whether it is energy security, which is particularly poignant at the moment when we're very worried about where our gas comes from and there are economic and political ramifications associated with it or if you're just worried about people that live in homes, they want a good performing built environment - healthy, affordable, warm - great places to grow up and live.

It's really important we sort out the performance. So it's an absolutely necessary journey.
The technology exists to do it. The challenges are within the way our industry is organised, the way our procurement supply chains are, and the fragmented nature of the industry that makes it difficult to achieve and it is going to be difficult. If we were going to do it without risk or cost, we should have done it 20 years ago. But we didn't, and now we really do have to get on with it, whether it's because of our commitments to abating climate change by 2050, for which the built environment can play a very big role, or could be a very big part of this problem. And now is our opportunity to change it from being part of the problem to part of the solution, it's as fast as we dare go, but it's not without risk or cost.

There are a lot of other pressures coming on board that we need to take into account. So, the Future Homes Standard was originally looking at part L energy efficiency, F for ventilation and we looked at overheating so that was major revisions to two parts of the regulations and one new part - the provisions for overheating - and then in parallel, a different government department was working on electric car charging infrastructure and it was felt that, given the shift within the building regulations favoring electricity as the primary energy source in homes, the fact that these two policy areas were coming forward on similar timelines, it made sense to bring the two together. So, part S, the new part of the regulations S, which is a provision of electric car charging infrastructure where there's a new home in the parking space, was brought into the regulations.

So, it's the biggest change to the building regulations in 30 years, it's absolutely an aligned, multi-part set of packages of changes on interrelated bits and, of course, has now started to pick up policy areas from other government departments as well. So, a very significant set of changes, particularly for electrical infrastructure on sites.

If you'd asked me that five years ago, I would've said there's no hope, there isn't any sign of that being on the regulatory agenda, it will be in the voluntary space. I think that has changed. I now see real push around embodied and I would expect, certainly this decade, to see minimum requirements in the building regulations around whole life building assessment, looking at material impacts, even if only a sort of minimum acceptable standards.

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