Sustainable and Secure Buildings Bill

What it is and what it proposes

Introduction

The Bill is a Private Member’s Bill brought in by Andrew Stunell MP, and supported by all-party sponsors including: Sir Sydney Chapman, Paddy Tipping, Peter Ainsworth, Sue Doughty, David Amess, Joan Walley, Sir Nicholas Winterton, Patsy Calton, Brian White, Simon Thomas, and Alan Simpson.

The Bill was presented on Jan 6^th, and the Second Reading will be on Friday Jan 30^th.

It is strongly supported by WWF, who sponsored the ‘One Million Sustainable Homes’ campaign, whose targets will be far easier to achieve if the Bill becomes law. The House of Common’s Environmental Audit Committee recommended similar measures in their 8^th Report (recommendation 17) last year.

Basic Aims

The Bill aims to make buildings of all sorts ‘greener’ and ‘safer’. It does this by strengthening the regulations on new, extended and altered buildings to require sustainability and crime reduction measures to be applied as a matter of course. It will bring into regulation schools and public utilities currently exempt, together with major repair and renovation works which are now partially exempt.

It will cover services within and around a building, and not just the structure itself.

In addition it requires the Government to report to Parliament on the extent to which sustainability and crime reduction measures have improved the building stock.

The Bill will do five things.

1. It gives new powers under the Building Act 1984 to improve the sustainability of buildings, currently responsible for around 30% of carbon emissions in the UK (more than the transport sector), and in general notoriously inefficient.

2. It gives new powers to improve the crime-resistance and security of buildings, where there are at present no statutory requirements to comply with police advice.

3. It gives powers to require that in certain circumstances large scale repair and renovation work should comply with the same standards of sustainability and crime resistance as equivalent new building work (at present it must simply be to no worse a standard than before repairs).

4. It brings into the scope of building regulations certain types of building that are currently exempted, including schools and operational buildings owned by public utilities.

5. It places a duty on the Government to report to Parliament at intervals on the progress made in making the building stock more sustainable and crime resistant, and improves the accountability for making sure building standards are kept.