Laws in UK are made by people we vote for. The House of Lords cannot make any laws. It can propose amendments to laws passed to it by House of Commons but ultimately the HoC has to pass the law and it has no obligation to accept any amendments. The HoL can block new laws but NOT if they are part of manifesto commitments
That I knew. But I thought that in UK you only can vote for MP in area you live in. And cannot vote against anyone, only for someone. Thus there are hundreds of MPs making laws and you had no say in their election.
Yes, you need ventilation and shading in a passive building... people into this kind of design have known this for more than 2 decades! NHBC needs to send people to the EU to learn a thing or two. I probably still have an old example of NHBC guidance somewhere in my loft, back in my time (12 years ago) they were more concerned by tree roots and structural calcs.
Very true, but when 95% of all your building plots are not oriented in just the right way, local building design dictates certain style, costs dictating how many frills you fit to a building before its uneconomic to build and the number of new builds where you can bring in good design proportionally tiny to the number of existing houses, then really only very high end typically totally uneconomic and more like 21st century “ folly’s” can fit into the Green politicians dreams of Net Zero.
Simple when you know what you are doing!
Still in contact with a British architect and she told me about the cladding hysteria, you could make them in metal, that would still work and keep the insurers happy. You can retrofit insulation and ventilation to an old victorian house, my wife was involved 15 years ago in a project where they renovated a Bristol terrace house to passive standards. It was a research project (If I remember well it was financed by the DTI), but much of what they had done could be put in place if people wanted to. They insulated everything and used the chimney for passive ventilation if I remember well.
Yes it can be done, my own house is fitted with underfloor heating ( low level water temps ), high levels of wall insulation, high levels of roof insulation using "Thatch" as part of the insulation value and relatively small windows, all built to my own design 30 years ago. It would be still current to the 2020 building regs in the UK. I have been a campaigner for major change of how and where we build houses in the UK for even longer, so please no lectures on what and how you can do with passive buildings, been there and done it for a lot of years.
Thats bollocks, it had nothing to do with what you are saying. It was a set of circumstantial errors by multiple companies that compounded up to where highly inflameable foam was attached to a high rise building in a manner it was never designed to be. It had nothing to do with the Tories.
Sadly as much as I think they are good products, in the grand scheme of building 100's of 1000's of building each year, they are just niche products that never can be used "en masse" and largely specified by over paid architects that have clients with unlimited budgets. They are never going to catch on I'm afraid.
I worked in the UK from 2002 to 2012 and building regs submissions definitely became easier after 2010.
For good reason, prior to 2010 it had become more and more a problem to submit the regs and get them looked at, not because of the regs themselves, but because local government had become more and more bogged down with politics, unions and numpties being employed that weren't really suitable for their jobs.
Why not ? It works...
We don't use Kingspan that much as far as I know, last time I specified petrol based insulation was in the UK as far as I can remember.
Not sure that Glenfell would have happened. Solution IMHO was more to fix the system...
Thus... they tried to fix the issue by nuking services that were meant to protect people, but at the end the radical surgery didn't fix anything!
We have some of the highest numbers ever of civil servants and yet productivity seems almost at its worst, what's that got to the with the Tories or even for that matter Brexit, the subject of this thread
Yes it does, but land values are so high here that to have 0.75 - 1 metre thick walls needed for straw insulation ( take into account all the various " skins " to protect the straw + aesthetic material such as brick to confirm to local vernaculars ) that it would be uneconomic on anything other than individual large properties on large ground areas, which the UK is not renown for.
If you want to keep it thin, you can do 40mm plaster + 370mm straw + 40mm render that's 450mm, not too bad considering that you get a R of about 7.
idiots These walls once you add plasterboard and cavity were 12.5+89+9+50+100 = 260.5mm if I remember well... For less than 200mm extra, you get external walls that make energy prices irrelevant and heating absolutely minimal... Dunno, I am not convinced that they have their priorities right... If they can't stomach 450mm wall, at least they could have 200mm insulation / structure and keep the rest within 60mm...
You are correct in some ways with the major builders in the UK pretty notorius for poor housing, but you only hear of the 1% of expectations of a 1M house for £250K and not the other 99.9% of new builds, which conform nicely to some pretty tight building regulations. The biggest problem as with all highly densely populated areas, is house numbers per hectare.
Last time I designed a UK style timber frame was in 2006,may be the cavity was already 100mm, it is a bit fuzzy in my head.
