OWLA do a fair bit of work for several residential care providers and since the Hackett Review we have noticed a change that is becoming the new normal. Fire compliance has become a lot tougher and justly so. Our first experience of this was whilst obtaining building regulations approval for a combined new build and retro fit home in Kent.

YOUR VOTE MATTERS

This is the second obituary to grace these pages. There is no desire to set a trend as it is a conversely maudlin and celebratory undertaking. But this one is important as I not only met Fumihiko Maki but he offered me a job.

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You need to read this – really you do. Despite (?!) being written by an economist it is accessible and engaging. What it does is equipe you for both the here and now and the future. Thinking of investment? My money (now) would be on sub-sea mining.

Stories of heat pump disaffection abound – ‘it’s cold, my energy bills have increased.’ Assuming it is not damaged it is not the fault of the technology but a product of incentivisation. The UK is purported to have the worst housing stock in Europe a fact we in the main would need to endorse. It also has (or did have) some fairly bold decarbonisation pledges.

OWLA commenced its second Passiv House project in 2022 prompting us to invest in the Passiv Haus Planning Package (PHPP) to assist our modelling of fabric at an early stage.

OWLA were presented with an award by the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society in October for their residential care extension at Mount Ephraim House in Kent.

Any of you ever wonder about the efficacy of these things? You need one to sell a house, there is a duty to display them in commercial properties and any new rental property will need to achieve a C rating by 2025 and any existing rental property by 2028. They feature a bar chart grading much like an appliance (the score being linked to a notional SAP rating) together with property details and various ways in which you might improve your score. Whilst there is no doubt there are some real professionals out there the general level of competence amongst assessors for the house buying public I would argue is poor but then nobody really appears to care as it is at best another cost. It will matter to renters given they will now have an expectation of performance relative to energy costs and rightly so. In time the market too may have due regard as better performing properties (bearing in mind the stock, new and old is pretty poor) may attract a higher price. It also matters to me because it makes little sense of energy targets and the status quo. Having recently been immersed in the property market I have some experience and here it is.

What with war, inflation and an energy crisis we now have the new Building Regulations, a since aborted review ‘ala Gove’ of the NPPF (beautiful) and suggestions of a fundamental overhaul of planning policy (welcomed but be careful what you wish for). There are anecdotes from both sides of the fence – client’s sensing a further imposition on their lifestyles (‘the Chinese dictating how we live’?) to builders predicting a 10% increase in costs while lamenting a happier time when there was no need to demonstrate compliance. And us? We just see it as business as usual then.

We clearly haven’t learnt any lessons from the Marble Arch Mound if some of the Unboxed (‘open, original, optimistic’) proposals are to go by. A decommissioned oil rig will spout trees in Weston-super-Mare for example. Why and what is Unboxed?

Richard Rogers was a big deal when I was at school. He and Norman Foster were the first Starchitects that I think the sixties gave birth to in a unique way.

A bag of the Anglian Lime Company’s ready mix, some trowels, a pointing tool and a stiff brush. Something of a practical training day in the Dark Arts. We all had a go, the only thing missing was any actual ability (a source of amusement for some).

We have been thinking about our responsibilities as a business and as an advisor of others. What can we do, what should we do? We understand the crude answer is use less but to do that we must do more. Clearly there are wider benefits in a community sense to sharing ideas as to how we get to Net Zero as it is fast becoming something (even if only in legislative terms) that will impact on us all.

A commitment to limit global temerature rise to 1.5 degrees is looking a bit shaky.  At COP, the UK government pledged to provide assistance to poorer nations and to stop burning coal for electricity generation by 2024.

The Grenfell Fire had a profound influence on construction and bottle necks in testing accompany a zero risk approach to certification and compliance.