The government’s Future Homes Standard (FHS) was finally laid down in March, ending a seven-year saga of consultations, delays, and widespread scepticism about whether it would ever actually arrive. Key requirements include:

- No fossil fuel heating
Air-source heat pumps and connections to heat networks become the default.

- Mandatory solar PV
On-site renewable generation mandatory for all new homes − in most cases rooftop solar panels.

- Enhanced building fabric performance
Stricter insulation standards, airtightness and mechanical ventilation requirements.

- 75% carbon reduction target
Compared to homes built under 2013 standards, FHS-compliant homes will produce at least 75% fewer operational greenhouse gas emissions.

Even so, the legislation doesn’t take effect until March next year. Any homes with a Building Regulations application submitted before then and built with at least the ground floor structure in place (not just the foundations) before March 2028, do not have to comply. This is frustrating for SME builders, many of which have been exceeding these standards for years and who are responsible for the great majority of the most energy efficient, high quality and outright beautiful homes built in the UK today.

Under successive governments, delays and dilutions to housebuilding regulations have arisen either explicitly as a result of lobbying by the volume housebuilders (eg the abandonment of Zero Carbon Homes) or implicitly (eg the Home Builders Federation's formal requests for longer transitional periods and warnings that higher standards would limit housing supply).

The irony is that the high administrative costs of those regulations fall disproportionately on the smaller builders, even where they are already compliant. They lack the economic and political power of the high volume players, even discounting the possible value of other factors (last year, a CMA investigation into alleged market collusion between major housebuilders closed without proceeding to decide whether illegal activity had occurred, after the companies under investigation agreed to end practices regarded as suspicious and to make an “ex gratia Affordable Homes Payment” of £100 million to government affordable housing programmes).

As a result, SME builders typically survive on margins of perhaps 5% − about a third of that enjoyed now by the volume housebuilders, most of which, pre-2022, reported gross profit margins of 20% − 30%.

SME housebuilders understand and meet local demand and depend on their local reputation for future sales. In the 1980s, they built at least 40% of all houses, much more in some areas. Today, they build the best houses on the market, often in collaboration with their buyers, producing homes ideally suited to their occupants and their neighbourhood. Yet their numbers have diminished from over 12,000 to some 2,500 today. In contrast, last year, the biggest six builders accounted between them for 56% of all new homes − double their share of twenty years ago.

The homes most prized decades from now will not be those built to the minimum standard permitted in 2027. They will be the houses built with care, character and craft, to standards set high long before the legislation caught up. So if you are thinking of buying − or commissioning − a new build home, do seek out the builders, developers and architects who are not household names, or ask at the Jackson-Stops office nearest to where you want to live, who they are. You don’t have to wait until 2028, for a ‘future home’.