Stair headroom building regulations

[bayswater]

I have moved into a brand new house and my neigbour believes that the headroom between the groung floor ceiling and the stairs is not big enough, ours measures 1.85m and he belives that it should be a min of 2m. I have looked this up and under section K of the buildings regulations and it says (quote)

"a headroom of 2m is adequate on the access between levels. For loft conversions where there is not enough space to achive this height, the headroom will be satisfactory if the height measused at the centre of the stair width is 1.9m reducing to 1.8mat the sideof the stair as shown in diagram 3"

what i'm not sure about is the use of the word "adequate" does anyone know if it has to be a minium of 2m or not - i don;t want to cause a fuss if i'm not correct.

any hekp will be much appricated.

Thanks

[terence7556]

phone your local building regs and ask the question but i wonder how they got planning approval if it was not correct

[buildersmate]

Well you looked in exactly the right place. I looked too, and there's nothing more. This is worth questioning with Building Control. One of the difficulties here is that each of the Regs start by saying something like 'the requirements of the legislation will be satisfied if the following is done ...'. The gist is that it is not the only way of satisfying the Regs, but on this one I don't see a get-out.
But then the builder might say, what do you want done about it? - are you up for carpenters hacking about the place.
By the way, this is not a planning issue and it is perfectly possible for a house to have planning permission but it can't be built to the required Building Regs.

[bayswater]

Thanks buildersmate, the whole reason we are questioning it is because we have had various problem since buying the house none of which have been resolved in a mannor we see fit - we are hoping that this will be a big enough problem so that they will have to pay some compensation.