One of the most far-ranging pieces of legislation about building safety recently was passed by Parliament. The UK Building Safety Act has been decades in the making, but it’s now become law.
Passed in April of this year, the Building Safety act overhauled regulations on building safety and gave homeowners and residents more power and protections to ensure that defects would be handled in a much safer way. It also has some impacts on the environment, something that also has been a long time coming for UK residents.
Here’s a quick look at how the Building Safety Act is set to impact people for years to come.
The biggest changes to housing
The act itself gave protections not only to homeowners but also to leaseholders. Now, building owners are responsible for changes to safety instead of leaseholders, also giving them more avenues to directly address safety concerns with those owners.
New regulations for safety are now in place for new structures as well. The act goes into specific frameworks for design, construction and management of newer homes.
Several new regulatory agencies are now in place to monitor the progress in building safety, with fines and penalties in place for owners who do not comply.
Environmental changes in the act
There are also several provisions related directly to energy use, all to help address environmental concerns. Here’s a look at a few of those:
- Starting now, new homes will need to produce 31% fewer carbon emissions. This can be achieved through electric heating systems or using renewable energy such as solar.
- Non-domestic builds will need to produce 27% less carbon, bringing them closer in line to standards for homes than ever before.
- Existing buildings need to raise heating and hot water systems with new controls, placing them at a maximum flow temperature of 55 degrees Celsius.
- Lighting efficacy also must now be set at 80 lumens per circuit for display lighting and 95 for general lighting.
There is also a new metric for efficiency called primary energy, which is used to better measure these last two elements to reduce emissions.
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