Welcome

1Welcome

This edition will be effective for every new home registered with NHBC where foundations are begun on or after 1 January 2018.

I am delighted to have joined NHBC, and to be learning more about the technical demands of house building. I am aware of the key role that the NHBC Standards play in helping the industry to improve the quality of new homes.

We are in a challenging period, with the industry looking to expand UK housing output, at a time of trade skills shortages. As a consequence, we are seeing a growing interest in the use of alternative forms of construction, commonly known as ‘modern methods of construction’ or ‘MMC’. Indeed, the Government’s Housing White Paper, ‘Fixing our broken housing market’ published in February 2017, makes reference to the speed, productivity, sustainability and skills advantages associated with MMC.

For more than 80 years, NHBC’s role has been to embrace innovation, whilst ensuring that homeowners’ interests are looked after. In particular we remain keen to ensure that all new homes, whether constructed using MMC or not, perform well in use and last well into the future, over many decades to come.

At the beginning of the year we introduced the NHBC MMC Hub (www.nhbc.co.uk/mmchub) to provide access to further information and research on MMC and details of the building systems that we accept. I am pleased that the Hub has now been visited many thousands of times, and this edition of the NHBC Standards now makes reference to it (see Technical Requirement R3). We encourage close links with those designing, manufacturing or using MMC to help ensure that technical details are agreed before work starts on site.

This edition now includes Chapter 6.11 ‘Render and rendering systems’, which was first published separately in 2016. Also, we have taken the opportunity to update a number of clauses to reflect changes to external references and standards.

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding these Standards, please liaise with your normal NHBC contact; otherwise, I trust you find them helpful in supporting the improvement in quality of new home building.

Steve Wood
Chief Executive Officer