The Building Acts and Regulations Applied

Houses and Flats

C.M.H. Barritt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138153899
• eBook ISBN: 9781317875055
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Ingegneria civile

This newly revised edition is an up-to-date and concise volume, clarifying the Building Acts and Regulations relating to houses, flats and maisonettes, for all construction professionals and students.

Each chapter forms a self-contained unit covering all the regulation requirements applicable to a particular part of a building, dealing with each part in turn. With this single volume, professionals can ensure that all regulations are fully covered in respect of houses, flats and maisonettes. Inclusion of the July 1995 changes in the Acts and Regulations ensures the text provides the very latest information.

An ideal reference book for architects, builders, structural and building services engineers. Essential supplementary reading for students undertaking courses in any of the above at HNC, HND and degree level.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 About this book

The basis for this book is the Building Regulations 1991. These replaced the Building Regulations 1985 although not all documents published under the latter were withdrawn or changed. Some of the new or amended documents are marked ‘1992 Edition’ and some are marked ‘1995 Edition’ in recognition of the fact that those are the years in which the amendments came into effect, the former on 1 June 1992 and the latter on 1 July 1995.

As explained later, the ways of meeting the requirements of the Regulations are contained in fourteen ‘Approved Documents’, each devoted to a particular topic such as Fire Safety or Hygiene. The information given in each Approved Document relates to all types of building or building use to which the Building Regulations apply. Therefore, the requirements applicable to a single building element such as, say, a wall, are to be found distributed throughout the Documents. This book not only explains the Regulations and ways of meeting their requirements, it also has this information arranged in a more convenient form under building element headings.

Furthermore, the whole book is a selection of those aspects that relate specifically to residential accommodation.

The materials and constructional techniques illustrated in this book are intended to show the more common methods used in practice – they are not exhaustive. Other, possibly more exotic, ways of meeting the requirements of the Regulations exist and more will, no doubt, be devised in the future. The fact that they are not included in this book does not mean that they are unsuitable, merely that space did not permit them.

1.2 The development of the Building Regulations

Building control in some form has existed for a very long time. The Romans, for instance, decreed how long sun dried bricks were to be left before they could be used and also made use of a punitive system whereby if a building collapsed with fatal consequences they executed the builder!

The earliest legislation of any significance in this country was in London and followed the Great Fire of 1666. This was a building code intended, not unnaturally, to prevent the outbreak and spread of fire and enforced by ‘discreet men, knowledgeable in building’. These ‘discreet men’ were the forerunners of the district surveyors who have, for many years, ensured compliance with the London Building Acts.

Elsewhere, there were a few towns and cities in which local Acts were passed to control fire hazards and sanitation but, generally, very little formal control existed until 1875. In that year the Government passed a Public Health Act which gave all local authorities the power to make local by-laws imposing standards of construction in relation to safety, fire prevention, health and sanitation.

Guidance was given to local authorities in the form of Model By-laws which they could adopt – with modifications as thought necessary. Housing was the only form of building subject to these rules, because this was the building type most frequently of substandard design and construction. The manner of control was to make simple statements of how the work was to be done. This assumed that by defining the way in which to build, the local authority would ensure good building performance without actually defining what that performance should be.

The introduction of building techniques using steel and concrete, which involved the mathematical analysis of structure, called for greater flexibility of control. This need gave rise to the amended Model By-laws introduced in the Public Health Act of 1936.

Following the Second World War there was a rapid development in building techniques leading to an increase in the analytical approach to building construction. There was also a much wider choice of materials and constructional systems available. As a consequence of this, many changes took place in building control, not the least significant of which was the appearance in 1953 of purely functional requirements in the by-laws. By this means the local authority could state what a system of construction must achieve rather than how it was to be built. The great advantage of this is that it left the designer free, should he so wish, to devise his own methods of building provided that he could prove that they would meet the defined standards. For the benefit of those who did not so wish, the by-laws also set out ‘deemed-to-satisfy’ provisions giving common building methods which, if followed, were considered capable of satisfying the mandatory performance standards.

At this time there were upwards of 1400 local authorities all with their own by-laws each containing minor but significant variations. This presented great difficulties to the many firms of architects and builders who were operating over a wide area of the country. To improve this situation, the Public Health Act of 1961 enabled the Minister to make national building regulations. The first of these came into force in February 1966 replacing all the local authority by-laws.

In 1974 there were several important Acts of Parliament, one of which was the Health and Safety at Work (etc.) Act. Its significance in this connection is that Part III of the Act took over from the Public Health Acts the legislation which enabled the appropriate Minister to make national building regulations. Not all buildings, however, were subject to these regulations. Certain buildings with specific uses were subject to their own sets of rules and, furthermore, they did not apply in London where the London Building Acts still set the standards

While these national building regulations were a great improvement on the old by-laws, they were rather difficult to understand and interpret, being written in the language reserved for legal documents as far as possible and totally without any diagrams. At the start of the 1980s both the future of building control and the form of the building regulations came under examination following which it was decided that the law, as stated in the regulations, should be separated from its interpretation as set out in the ‘deemed-to-satisfy’ clauses.

Following this study and ten years after the Health and Safety at Work (etc.) Act, the Build...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Work Below Ground
• Chapter 3 External Walls
• Chapter 4 Ground Floors
• Chapter 5 Suspended Upper Floors
• Chapter 6 Roofs
• Chapter 7 Internal Walls
• Chapter 8 Windows, Doors and Ventilation Openings
• Chapter 9 Staircases
• Chapter 10 Fireplaces, Hearths and Chimneys
• Chapter 11 Gas and Oil Fired Equipment, Heating and Hot Water
• Chapter 12 Bathrooms, Toilets and above Ground Drainage
• Chapter 13 Below Ground Drainage, Rainwater Disposal and Solid Waste Storage
• Chapter 14 House and Bungalow Conversions and Conservatories
• Chapter 15 Means of Escape and Fire Fighting Facilities
• Appendix A Sap Energy Rating Calculation Worksheet
• Appendix B Worked Example of Sap Energy Rating Calculation Worksheet
• Appendix C Provisions for Disabled People
• Appendix D Revisions to the Regulations and Approved Documents
• Index