MADE.

Building for Life will ensure that local authority assessments of the quality of housing schemes will be consistent across the region and the country. That was the message when officers from 27 local planning authorities (out of 30 in the region) turned up to be trained as in-house building for life assessors.

The would-be assessors will now be completing their ‘homework’ before being accredited by CABE. These assessors will carry out assessments at pre-application and planning application stages as well as helping to complete the annual monitoring returns on completed schemes. They can also act as moderators for completed assessments.

It is important that local authority planning departments discuss how they will assess schemes against the Building for Life standard in the future and who they would like to become their in-house assessor.

The Building for Life standard is growing in importance:
• Building for Life has grown from an award for excellent housing developments, to a tool for housing audits and now to a tool for assessing planning proposals and for reporting on local authority achievement of housing quality
• RegenWM ran a number of Building for Life awareness raising seminars during 2008, these showed an appetite for using this standard in the region in both the public and private sectors
• Building for Life is being adopted as part of the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy. You will appreciate this means that in time your local authority will have to incorporate Building for Life into its planning policies.
• In December 2009 the annual monitoring returns of each local planning authority will have to record the Building for Life levels achieved for all schemes of 10 homes or more completed in 2008-9.
• CABE has funds to provide training and accreditation to create one in-house Building for Life assessor in each local authority. We hope that larger authorities will want to have more assessors trained at cost and that larger Social Landlords and Housing Market Renewal and New Deal for Communities agencies will also want to have accredited assessors in house.
• To be recognised by CABE each Building for Life pre-application assessment will have to be logged in a central database and moderated by and independent assessor.

The database will be managed by CABE , but CABE is looking to MADE to operate a panel of independent assessors/moderators in the West Midlands.

MADE will continue to support the Building for Life assessors in the region and will be working to ensure that all local planning authorities have in-house assessors.

For further details contact David Tittle This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it 0121 633 9403