Residents on a Lancashire estate have slammed house builders Redrow, saying roof tiles have fallen off homes they built for the third time in two years.

Homeowners in the Old Lane Park area of Penwortham say dozens of homes on the estate suffered roof damage when gales battered the county last week.

Amazingly, no-one was injured by the falling tiles, but the complaints are the latest in a catalogue of grievances against the quality of roofs on Redrow homes.

Fred Walmsley, 40, lives with partner Nicola Webb, 43, and four children in a £250,000 detached home on the estate. Six ridge tiles came off his roof in the storm.

Wrong size, wrong shape, wrong place: developers are building tiny inner-city flats when buyers want three-bed family houses. Meanwhile new apartments stand empty and are losing value. Susan Emmett reports

Britain needs new homes and developers are more than happy to oblige. But they are not building the homes we want. Families, couples, singletons and even first-time buyers want houses, yet developers continue to build inadequately sized flats at the most astonishing rate, as Bricks and Mortar can disclose.

With over 160,000 new homes being built across the UK every year there is an enormous amount of choice when it comes to buying new.

Many people will only buy new, claims New Build Inspections, and return to buy another new home despite the problems of getting building snags fixed.

A short guide from the firm outlines the advantages and disadvantages of buying a new build home and helps to explain why some people love new homes and some people detest them.

Even new homes will throw up nasty surprises for the unwary, says Catriona Bright, founder and MD of New Build Inspections, who says that Britain is amongst the worst countries in the EU in which to buy new property. In Ireland, she says, the process is much easier, as it is normal custom and practice for newbuild buyers to instruct a professional snagger to create a snag (or problem) list for a newbuild property after all, you wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive.

Homebuyers are not being given the information they need and are legally entitled to about the energy efficiency of brand new homes, according to the National Energy Services (NES) and De Montfort University.

Undercover researchers discovered that 98% of house builders’ sites fail to comply with the current Building Regulations to display SAP energy ratings. Three quarters of the builders’ sales negotiators interviewed by researchers could not explain the SAP energy rating to customers, and over half didn’t even realise that new homes now come with an energy rating at all. Read more

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A pristine blank canvas on which your family can make its mark, a brand new house is an option worth serious consideration for those in the market to move…

If the idea of a brand new house brings to mind rows of identical, boxy houses on estates located too far from the shops, then think again. These days, new homes take all kinds of forms, and are often designed with a much more thoughtful approach to how they will be lived in.

Whole estates and small tracts of new homes are still going up – in some cases, making good use of redundant ‘brownfield’ sites, thus avoiding incursions into the countryside.

Read More: Snagging.

New homes finished in the first half of 2005 have an average of 80 defects per property – up over 50% on 2004, and this at a time when some large house builders are announcing vast profits for the first half of 2005 (in excess of £39,000 per home).

This is according to academics at the School of the Built and Natural Environment at Glasgow Caledonian University in conjunction with a home inspection firm who recently released the first ever research paper on snagging defects in new homes, highlighting the decreasing standards of new build housing in the UK.

The data was taken from snagging inspections carried out by Inspector Home over the past four years, which was then analysed by the University. The performance of new homes, the design of new homes, the materials used in new homes and most importantly workmanship issues have all been examined in considerable detail.

Snagging – making a snag list – is the building industry term for the process of finding and fixing all those niggling little (and sometimes not so little) things that go wrong during the building process. Issues always occur with every property built and the best builders will always include a snagging process to catch these items and fix them. Unfortunately even the finest builders don’t seem to get it right, and the recent survey show that the problem is growing. These days the word snagging is more often used to describe just the finding and listing of the snag list.

Initial analysis of over 100,000 defects indicates that snagging levels in Scotland, the South East & the South Midlands are significantly worse than homes in the rest of the UK.

London had the fewest defects per home with an average of 47, however these figures could reflect the smaller size of properties built in the Capital.

Read more: Snagging

Buy a new motor and you expect it to lose value as the sheen comes off its bodywork and it picks up a few dents in the supermarket car park. But a new house? When homebuyers take the keys to a brand new home they tend to take it for granted that its value will go up, in spite of the odd stain on the carpet and cracked bathroom tile.

Who wants to buy a new home?

This situation is criticised today by the Scottish Consumer Council in a report
which outlines a series of changes designed to give greater protection to
Scots who buy new houses.

Newly built houses are not covered by the Sale of Goods Act 1979 which
applies to most purchases made by consumers.

The Act states that goods
must be of satisfactory quality and reasonably fit for purpose. This, together
with other current problems, means that new home buyers can face delays in
completion of their new house and difficulties in getting faults such as leaky
windows, rocky staircases and ill fitting doors fixed.

This is at a time when new house building is booming and complaints about
house construction have increased. The number of new houses built in
Scotland increased by 17% between October 2003 March 2004, compared
with the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile complaints across the UK
increased by 9.5% between 2002 and 2003.

The SCC report says the evidence available suggests that new build home
buyers are all too often experiencing:

late completion of houses

pressure to accept incomplete houses

an after-build service delivered late, or not at all

inadequate means of redress.

The report Regulation of the New House Building Market in Scotland says that
the contract or missives drawn up between building firms and buyers is often
too heavily weighted in favour of the builders.

It used to be common practice,
for instance, for missives to contain a clause stating that any problems with a
new house identified in the first 12 months would be put right at the builders
expense. This now appears to be the exception and, if any guarantee
periods are included in the missives at all, they are often short.

Similarly, missives do not generally include a specific entry date for the buyer.
Most simply define a date of entry as being a certain number of days after the
property has been granted a completion certificate. The report says that
delays of several months have been widely reported in Scotland, causing
problems for buyers, particularly if they have a fixed date for selling their own
property.

The Law Society of Scotland and Homes for Scotland, the body that
represents the Scottish house building industry, have been working together
to produce a draft standard builders missive which is likely to be piloted in the
near future. It aims to redress the balance of power between the buyer and
seller and has been welcomed by the SCC.

Other positive developments which have taken place recently include :

the introduction of a scheme in Scotland known as the revised finalling
procedure by the Council of Mortgage Lenders. Under this scheme,
mortgage funds will not be released until the property has had a
satisfactory final inspection. This offers some form of consumer protection
for the buyer.

the establishment of a Construction Innovation and Excellence Forum for
the construction industry designed to raise standards across the sector.

However the SCC says that while there are potential improvements arising
from these initiatives, the law still does too little for buyers of new homes. It is
calling for a major change in extending the level of consumer protection
provided by the Sale of Goods Act to cover new built houses.

The report adds that this enhanced statutory protection needs to be
underpinned by effective self-regulation by the industry. It recommends that a
Code of Practice be drawn up to help govern the way the industry operates.
This should be led by Homes for Scotland in consultation with consumer and
other stakeholder interests.

Martyn Evans, director of the Scottish Consumer Council said: It is plainly
wrong that people who typically spend over 100,000 buying a new house
may have less protection than those spending just a few pounds on the High
Street or in a supermarket. The law needs to be changed to bring about
improvements and this will require joint working between the Scottish
Executive and the UK Government.

However there is an obligation on the building industry itself to prevent
problems arising in the first place. That is why we have called for a Code ofPractice to be developed to regulate the way the industry operates and drive
up standards. We hope these key recommendations will be implemented to
make buying a new house a much more problem-free experience in the
future.