16. The Building Regulations 2000 apply to most building work in England and Wales. Approved Documents are approved by the Secretary of State and are intended to provide guidance, for some of the more common building situations, on ways of demonstrating compliance with the Requirements in the Regulations. However, there may be alternative ways of achieving compliance with the Requirements. There is no obligation to adopt a particular solution contained in an Approved Document provided the requirement is met in some other way. Approved Document E provides guidance on resistance to the passage of sound.
17. There are currently three Requirements under Part E of Schedule 1 to the Building Regulations 2000:
18. These three Requirements apply to separating walls, floors and stairs:
Essentially, the objective is that walls shall provide reasonable resistance to airborne sound, and floors and stairs shall provide reasonable resistance to both airborne and impact sound.
19. A revised Requirement E1 consolidates the current Requirements E1, E2 and E3 within a new Requirement E1 Protection against sound from adjoining dwellings or buildings etc. The new Requirement E1 extends the current Requirements to apply the need for sound insulation more generally and to cover rooms for residential purposes (which includes rooms within hotels, boarding houses, hostels, student accommodation and similar accommodation). A new Regulation has been introduced to ensure that compliance with Requirement E1 is verified by a system of sound insulation testing - subsequently referred to as pre-completion testing in this document.
20. The changes also include three new Requirements:
21. The consultation paper Proposals for Amending Part E - Resistance to the Passage of Sound also contained details of an additional proposed Requirement Protection against noise from external sources. This proposed Requirement involved the transfer of responsibility for the protection of the building envelope against external noise from planning to Building Regulations. The proposed Requirement was well supported during the consultation exercise but legal advice has since been received that the proposals are not workable without changes to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The benefits of the proposed Requirement included that sound insulation, thermal and ventilation aspects of the building envelope could have been considered together and that the inter-dependence of sound insulation from external sources, internal sources and adjacent dwellings could have been addressed.
22. Requirement E4, although a new Requirement, is simply a mechanism for the transfer of control over the acoustics of schools from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (Previously Department for Education and Employment - DfEE) to Building Regulations. This proposal was the subject of a separate consultation exercise by the DfEE14. Requirement E4 parallels the requirement in the current DfEE School Premises Regulations that in turn quotes the acoustic criteria contained in Section A of Building Bulletin 87 'Guidelines for Environmental Design in Schools'. It is intended that a new Building Bulletin 93, to be produced by DfES, will incorporate this Section A and give guidance on compliance with the requirements. The Government ended the current system where maintained schools were exempt from Building Regulations on 1st April 2001. The same minimum design standards now apply to all new schools, and all new schools are subject to the building control system in order to improve enforcement.
23. The DfEE consultation paper discussed the issues surrounding the exemption of maintained schools from the Building Regulations and, accordingly, the remainder of this RIA is only concerned with Requirements E1 to E3.
24. The amendments to the Building Regulations and to Approved Document E in support of Requirements E1 to E3 fall into three main categories:
25. This RIA focuses on those changes that are considered significant, as summarised in Table 1. More details on the changes from the current arrangements that are associated with Requirement E1 are given in Appendix B.
Table 1: Summary of new Requirements E1 to E3 |
Requirement E1 Protection against sound from adjoining dwellings or buildings etc. (i) Changes resulting from the extended scope of Requirement E1 'Rooms for residential purposes' (includes rooms within hotels, boarding houses, hostels, student accommodation, nurses' homes and elderly persons' homes) are now covered. (ii) Measures to improve sound insulation Introduction of an explicit (minimum) performance standard to replace the current need to infer the meaning of 'reasonable sound insulation' from the performance of the constructions described in the current Approved Document E. The new performance standard is set at a higher level than current implicit target values, and reflects current European standards by adopting a new rating method for airborne sound insulation that takes better account of the transmission of low frequency sounds. Technical changes to guidance on separating and flanking constructions in the Approved Document so that those constructions remaining in the Approved Document are likely to meet the performance standard; those constructions that are less likely to meet the performance standard have been removed. (iii) Measures that improve compliance with Requirement E1 Introduction of a pre-completion testing regime to apply to new dwellings, material change of use and rooms for residential purposes. Pre-completion testing also replaces the alternative compliance procedures contained in Sections 3, 4 and 6 of the current Approved Document. Clarification and restructuring of current guidance. Change from current generic descriptions of constructions and construction elements to performance standards, which encourage development of proprietary products, wherever current knowledge allows. |
Requirement E2 Protection against sound within a dwelling etc. a. New Requirements E2(a) and E2(b) based on current good practice extended to protect rooms designated as bedrooms. b. New guidance in the Approved Document standardises and extends current good practice. |
Requirement E3 Reverberation in the common internal parts of buildings containing dwellings etc. a. New Requirement based on current good practice. b. New guidance in the Approved Document standardises and informs current good practice. |
14 DfEE. Ending the Exemption of Maintained Schools from the Building Regulations, Consultation Paper, March 2000
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