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Building Regulations
Future Homes Standard
How construction management software helps you meet changing regulatory standards?
Alex Timperley
The regulatory environment for construction in the UK is becoming more complex. New legislation and requirements for contractors make even a simple residential build more difficult than it was in the past.
A good example is the Future Homes Standard (FHS) which was announced this year. It is designed to make our built environment more sustainable. All new homes will be net zero carbon ready from 2027. Electricity will be used for heating and hot water rather than fossil fuels.
That is a major shift. Compliance with Part L of the Building Regulations now means removing greenhouse gas emissions at source, rather than simply reducing energy usage. That change in priorities will have implications for planning, costing and delivering residential projects in the UK when it comes into force in 2027.
How will compliance with the Future Homes Standard be demonstrated?
Design teams will have to demonstrate compliance using SAP 10.3 or the Home Energy Model (HEM). The HEM is a new system which is more detailed and requires more information to be inputted from the earliest stages of a project.
That means:
- Making key design decisions at a much earlier stage.
- Greater coordination will be needed between different disciplines.
- More accurate predictions of real-world energy performance must be produced.
- Construction must adhere to plans very closely.
If this does not happen – or you cannot produce all the required information when needed – it could impact projects in a number of ways, including:
- Construction programmes falling behind.
- Additional rework on site.
- Extra costs added to the budget at a late stage.
- Reputational damage.
- Projects becoming unviable.
- Fines in the worst cases.
How can contractors and developers comply with the Future Homes Standard?
Complying with this standard is not necessarily going to be simple, but it should also not be viewed as intimidating. It will be a change for contractors and developers, but there are ways to make the transition as painless as possible.
The number one way to help your business is to use a construction management software solution such as Gsite. Bringing all your people, processes and data into a single connected system allows you to unify all parts of your business.
Instead of all your plans, data, schedules, reports, photo evidence, procurement information and more being stored in a dozen different places, Gsite offers a single source of truth which everyone can refer back to.
This is valuable financially as it speeds up decision making, cuts out rework and eliminates much down time on site. However, it might be even more useful when it comes to regulatory compliance by:
- Building audit trails into your daily workflow, rather than having to create them after the fact.
- Reduce the risk of lost documentation which you need later as evidence.
- Automate key administrative tasks to reduce the impact of human error.
- Ensuring everyone is working to the most up-to-date plans, with any changes being distributed immediately.
- Streamlining the inspection and site diary process.
In other words, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for construction can give you an efficient, structured way to meet regulations like the Future Homes Standard without slowing your workflows. In most cases, the same construction management software system will actually speed up work on your site at the same time – making it a key productivity tool as well.
