Future Homes and Buildings Standards

[edit] Introduction

The Future Homes Standard (FHS) and Future Buildings Standard (FBS) are the next iteration of the Building Regulations Part L for residential and non-residential buildings respectively. Part L 2021 was in effect introduced as an interim step towards this new standard, having been announced 2 years earlier in 2019, then in 2023 a further consultation was launched, the intention being the new standard would come into force in 2025. The government has more recently announced that it intends for the new standard to be in place in the Autumn of 2025.

[edit] So what are the difference in the new standard

is a planned obligatory standard for all new homes, that aims to reduce carbon emissions by 75–80% when compared to current UK regulation requirements, one element of this will be the prohibition of gas boilers. Its counterpart is the Future Buildings Standard (FBS) which aims to achieve the same for all other non-domesticnew buildings.

The FHS, intended to come into force in 2025 will also see the introduction of a new way of calculating how the standard is met, using the new Home Energy Model (HEM) by means of the FHS wrapper for domestic buildings. The FHS wrapper is a component part the HEM which assesses if a particular building meets the standard, it will do so by helping manage the complex data associated with the building use by using a range of assumptions about the building.

The assumptions made by wrappers represent a variety of data input sets which might include factors such as occupancypatterns, local weather, building standards and potentially white goods, airtightness, and ventilation. The idea being that the HEM is more sophisticated that previous tools such as SAP, being more detailed and flexible enough for a range of buildings, whilst the wrapper helps to simplify the process so it can be applied more widely. It was although also announced by the government that the Future Homes Standard may use both SAP 10.3 and HEM with the wrapper,

The Future Buildings Standard (FBS) will on the other hand will most likely continue to use a combination of different energy performance modelling tools; such as Dynamic Simulation Models (DSMs) and the most recent update of Simplified Building Energy Model (SBEM). The current version is iSBEM_v6.1.e, and it can be used for the purposes of: assessing compliancewith 2021 ADL V2 in England and generating England EPC.

The Home Energy Model and Future Homes Standard assessment wrapper