Ms Orla Hegarty:

The Building Regulations Advisory Board is there in statute. It was disbanded in about 2012 and has not been in operation since. This is a major failing because individual buildings are being reviewed in isolation when they are all connected. In the case of the new build-to-rent apartment standards, I do not believe there was due consideration of the impact of taking out cross ventilation, lowering ceiling heights so there was less volume, making spaces smaller and removing lobbies to corridors so that there was more of a risk, as we have seen in buildings with long corridors such as the quarantine hotels in Australia, of pressure build up in rooms with long corridors where there are heavy fire doors and one gets airflow conditions that cannot be predicted. This has caused cross contamination in quarantine hotels in Australia. Daylight standards have been reduced, balconies have been taken out, which means it is difficult to purge ventilate a room, and more people are sharing lifts than is probably appropriate for public health. An independent building regulation advisory board that works openly and transparently with a lot of high-level expertise would be very helpful because often a change is made in one area without recognition of the impact and these things are all connected through architecture, be they climate change, the pandemic, cost saving or daylight. The lack of an open board or possibly a mechanism for those kinds of discussions has been detrimental. It would be good to see that resumed.

To answer the question about ventilation, we have had improving energy performance requirements over the past ten or 15 years driven by the energy performance and buildings directive from Europe but the ventilation standards have been very slow to catch up in parallel with that. Ironically, some of our newer buildings that are more airtight may be higher risk for Covid than some of our older buildings.