Gwynne Anthony 2020

ART506 Dissertation 2019. Anthony Gwynne . 23 (i) The Building Act 1984 (Applies to England and Wales) The Building Act 1984 provides the framework for the Building Regulations for the purposes of securing the health, safety, welfare and convenience of persons in or about buildings and of others who may be affected by buildings or matters connected with buildings, furthering the conservation of fuel and power, and preventing waste, undue consumption, misuse or contamination of water. It also introduced the use of Approved Documents to provide practical guidance in support of the Building Regulations (www.legislation.gov.uk) . It’s interesting to note for this report that the question of whether Local Authorities are liable for negligence in the exercise of their powers in relation to the Building Regulations (i.e. can they be sued) has been subject to considerable recent case law culminating in the landmark decision of the House of Lords in Murphy v. Brentwood District Council (1990) where it was held that local authorities cannot be held liable for economic loss but only for actual damage to people’s health and safety. This judgement halted 13 years of expansion of the tort of liability (Billington, M J. et al. 2017). (ii) The Building Regulations 2010 (Wales) The Building Regulations are themselves very short paragraphs that contain no technical details and are expressed as functional requirements and are difficult to interpret or understand. For this reason, the Welsh Government publishes practical guidance on meeting these requirements in a series of 20 documents known as Approved Documents (gov.wales). Therefore, it is the guidance in Approved Documents that are being questioned in this study and not the actual Building Regulation requirements that can be viewed in the front of each of the Approved Documents. Breach of the Building Regulations is a criminal offence and carried an unlimited fine on conviction. (iii) The Approved Documents (Wales) The Approved Documents (Figure 6), are available to download free of charge and provide practical guidance and refers to other standards applicable to modern buildings and if this guidance is followed it is deemed to satisfy compliance with the Building Regulations. For example, Approved Document C is for the resistance to the