The construction industry should be looking further towards the future and predicting Building Regulation changes, not just reacting to today’s requirements, an industry conference was told.

The audience was mostly made up of members of the Chartered Institute of Building; a mixture of contractors, housebuilders, building surveyors and project managers, as well as architects, engineers and local authority building control officers.

Event organiser and chartered surveyor Paul Cook said, "The construction industry needs to get wiser and plan for the long-term – not simply for the next five years, but we need to predict and conform to Building Regulation changes for the next 50 years – we’re letting our future generations down if we don’t."

Sustainability factors highly in the future of housing construction, but developers and architects are not embracing this vital issue sufficiently, the conference debated. The session, led by long-standing construction authority Professor Michael Benfield, formed the CIOB Wiltshire Centre annual event.

The top barriers to the industry to were found to be:

• Quality – attention to detail, local materials and in-keeping vernacular features to move us away from ‘developer boxes
• Commercial investment – invest more resources in the design stage, from an earlier point in the project
• Energy efficiency – design for very energy-efficient buildings with sustainable features integrated, not ‘bolted-on’.

For professional managers:

• Competency of Staff – finding ways of retaining skilled staff and keeping them in the industry
• Training investment – Invest more in ‘soft’ skills to rid the industry of its reputation for confrontation and blame
• Embrace change – Our homes will be around in 50/100 years time…will they still meet the building regulation changes…will they be easy to update? No? Then change, and think of the future.

For suppliers:

• Recyclability – produce and explicitly state the recyclability of products
• Environmental Impact – look at whole-life-costing and procuring cheaper, more energy-efficient and more environmentally-friendly alternatives to existing products.
• Locality of materials – try and source materials locally rather than on a national basis.

For specifiers:

• Legislation – specify the incorporation of such products and Forest Stewardship Council (fst) timber
• Change in attitudes – educate the end-users/clients in why such materials have been specified
• True Sustainability – design for very energy-efficient buildings with sustainable features integrated, not ‘bolted-on’.