The right to build your own home

Building your own home means taking responsibility for decisions that affect your daily life: how the structure is designed, which materials you use, how it is maintained, and what happens when something needs fixing. We want the law to recognize the owner's authority to make those decisions and undertake the work personally.

The restriction proposed above concerns effects such as wastewater reaching a neighbor's well or a fire spreading onto adjoining land. Rules can address that harm directly. A future sale would bring disclosure and buyer protections into consideration, with obligations attached to that transaction.

One existing example is Warren County, Missouri, whose published rules specify zoning setbacks and state that the county has no building codes or final inspections. The document describes requirements that property owners can read for themselves, including distances from roads and property boundaries.

A requirement to obtain approval should come with an explanation of what is being checked, who is qualified to check it, and what responsibility that person carries for their decision. Checking a roof's load calculations requires engineering knowledge, including the ability to establish whether the design assumptions and calculations apply to the structure being built.

The owner should have access to the applicable code, the review criteria, and the qualifications of the people making technical judgments. Each permit requirement should have a stated purpose, with its fees and processing time accounted for, so that the owner can understand the work performed and question a decision on specific grounds.

Estonia allows a qualified installer to certify specified work on an existing compliant low-voltage installation, protected at up to 35 A, without a separate pre-use audit. This involves tests, measurements, a visual inspection and written confirmation, all of which provide evidence about the installation and the work performed.

We want owners to have a route to demonstrate competence and document their own work, with the required evidence stated in advance. Electrical faults can cause shock or fire, so a licensing restriction needs a specific justification explaining the harm it prevents and why that restriction is necessary.

Personal responsibility includes the ability to make binding declarations about one's decisions. Under eIDAS (Art. 25(2)), qualified electronic signatures carry legal force; our proposal calls for owners to be able to document their construction work and take responsibility for the declarations they make about it.

The Code of Hammurabi, from about 1750 BC, regulated building work done for someone else: a builder whose house collapsed and killed its owner was punished. It said nothing about people building for themselves.

Control over building trades subsequently included chartered guilds: London's Carpenters' Company received a royal charter in 1477, and Glasgow's Wrights secured a monopoly on carpentry in their city. Feudal tenure subjected landholding to a lord's authority, and serfdom in Estonia was abolished through the reforms of 1816–1819.

Allodial title describes the ownership this campaign seeks: land held from no one, with the owner exercising authority over its use. This is the political aim of the campaign, and achieving the rights proposed here requires changes to the laws currently governing construction and land use.

Every requirement to obtain permission should have a current justification that identifies the harm involved and explains why the restriction is necessary. For a shed used to store tools, for example, the authority should be able to describe the effect on adjoining land that it intends to prevent and show how its requirement addresses that effect.

Under our proposal, a restriction would depend on evidence of harm extending beyond the owner's land and on the proportionality of the measure being imposed. This would give the owner specific grounds on which to examine and challenge the authority's decision.

We want EU law to place an explicit limit on the power to refuse an owner permission to build their own home. The proposed right would bind every member state, with restrictions subject to the conditions set out in the article above.

This requires a change to the Treaty/Charter framework that establishes the right and its reach. The campaign's European Parliament petition is intended to put that demand on record and seek political support for the amendment.