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Guest Blogger Lynne Sullivan, Sustainable by Design

Having chaired the Part L and Part F Working Party on behalf of BRAC, I was not surprised to see the hard copy consultation amount to some 800 pages. As we know, making the simple complicated is commonplace – Charlie Mingus said that! – but making the complicated simple is much harder, and I urge fellow architects and building professionals to make their views known via the consultation, and especially to test their interaction with the separate consultations for revised SAP and SBEM (Simplified Building Energy Model) calculation methodologies.

To achieve a further 25 per cent reduction in CO2 from 2006 levels, we need to produce higher performance buildings and a more detailed understanding of building energy performance is necessary to be able to achieve this optimally under the present building regulations system – arguably even if we move to a building standards system where thermal performance is certified by Appointed/Competent persons.

In the Part L consultation, reinforced by the Zero Carbon Definition response from government, a clear emphasis on reducing demand through building fabric is made explicit in the guidance, although as yet the proposals are not prescriptive via U-values and the principle of design freedom is maintained.

As an architect, it is clear to me that we need to gear our design development process to understand the impacts of what we draw from day one – in Part L and F terms, this means getting orientation, fenestration, construction typology and solar access right so that we are using the ‘basics’ to minimise demand as far as possible from the very outset.

Filed under: Green practice, Policy watch