Confessions of a Frustrated Builders Merchant

I have a confession to make.

I find it really hard to like, let alone love the construction industry.

Construction has the opportunities to achieve so much for the greater good:

Efficient, well built, comfortable, affordable housing

Innovation in sustainability

Skills and a sense of self-value for school leavers

Instead we get landed with a constant feeling of missed opportunities, poor quality workmanship, inequality across job roles and small businesses going bust because of slow and late payments.

The Future Homes Standard consultation is the latest shoulder-sagging, sigh-inducing moment as the focus on improving the building fabric for new homes has been passed over in favour of concentrating on bolt-on technology. There was a moment when I really believed that a blended approach between improved fabric, renewable energy technology and designed ventilation was going to be delivered. That for once, the UK authorities would learn from decades of experience and data drawn from other nations about how to build truly equitable low energy housing. But no. We bottle it again and condemn future generations to having to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on houses that they can't afford to buy and will still need upgrading to deal with fuel poverty and a rapidly changing climate.

"Ah yes but..." say the Very Large House Builders (VLHB), "...if you want 300,000 homes a year built they need to be cheap and easy to build, not expensive and onerous." This is an argument that disingenuously misleads the public and the politicians into thinking that it's not possible to build the efficient, safe, comfortable homes that we need on a budget we can afford. It also overlooks the fact that the VLHB weren't delivering the numbers of houses the country needed when you could build them out of flapjack and wet paper towels and still achieve the required building standards of the day.

Let's take airtightness as an example. Under Option 2 in the FHS proposal, an air leakage rate of 5m3/m2/h at 50Pa is deemed as acceptable. When I started in the industry in 2010, building regs had it at 10m3/m2/h so progress has been made. However I remember being taught by niall crosson and others that having an air leakage rate of 10 is like making a building fully airtight and then puncturing a hole the size of a 20p piece in the building fabric every m2. So it's OK folks, half the holes in your colander of a home will be filled in so you can also halve the number of scarves and jumpers you have to wear.

The ventilation strategy is for "natural ventilation and intermittent extract fans". So trickle vents then. I often think of Professor Howard Liddell with things like this and wonder what choice phrases he would come out with when trickle vents are described as "natural ventilation". A draught is uncontrolled ventilation. The proposal under the FHS is that we continue to allow draughty homes to be built.

When will the construction industry get the message? We need to change and we need to change now. The longer the industry continues to accept shoddy standards, unscrupulous practises and the pursuit of eye-watering profits for a small number of gigantic corporations, the more radical the change we need will become.

This is not a rallying cry for a Soviet era approach to utilitarianism, far from it. It's a heart-felt appeal for construction to realise that instead of being a by-word for poor quality workmanship and dead-end jobs, it could be the industry that people look to with admiration and respect. It could be the industry our children want to join for positive reasons, not because it's all they think they have available as a last resort. It could be the industry to help raise living the standards and health of the most vulnerable in our society.

I'm very sad to say that I don't see any sign of this changing in my working lifetime.