A forum for open discussion on communities and local government policy.

Achieving Building Standards

The Government has recognised that there are some issues with the existing system of Building Regulation, including concerns about compliance and enforcement. In particular, the Government is interested in reviewing the effectiveness of its guidance, concerns about industry’s ability to find the right resources, and questions about whether Building Regulations are targeting the right things in the right way.

As a result we have initiated a programme of work to consider the current situation of Building Regulations and how we manage and maintain them, and to identify what we might do to improve this.

This topic will provide input to this work and will run until 13 December 2006. Below is a list of the points that we hope that this discussion will help us to address. We anticipate that many people will want to contribute to this discussion, so in order to manage the site more efficiently we will only be able to display responses which address at least one of the questions below, and which follow the discussion rules of this site.

  • Are building standards regulating for the right things in the right way?
  • Are these standards being achieved, and if not is there anything stopping them from being enforced?
  • What helps people to comply with them?
  • What stops people from complying with them?
  • How could we improve compliance and why will this work?

All of your views are welcome and will be even more effective if you state in which capacity they are made; either as a member of the general public e.g. home owner or as someone with a professional interest e.g. architect.

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Part P- cut out the greedy costs

Posted by JohnNeal on 13/12/2006 - 11:17

While I agree with many of the points made by tgirvan - I really cannot let his comment that Local Authorities are being greedy when charging £80 to inspect an instalation that may only cost £10 in materials pass without comment of my own.

Local Authorities are required by Government to make a charge for the Building Control sevice which fully recovers the cost of providing it - it is a statutory requirement - we HAVE to do it.

That cost itself is dictated by the need to employ staff to enter the application onto computer systems, to pay the salary and travel costs for a qualified BCO to visit the site (probably at least twice) and to issue all the paperwork necessary when the job is complete. We have to do basically the same amount of work in dealing with a £10 job as for a £1000 job.

I appreciate that this is frustrating - and may even be couterproductive in causing people to avoid sending a notification - but please do not call us greedy for doing what the law says we have to do. How many electricians out there would be prepared to carry out this amount of work for £80 ?

Personally I would prefer not to receive any electrical notifications at all. I always reccommend that people use a Part P registered electrician for thier work - and I would be quite happy if this became a mandatory requirement. People cannot legally carry out gas instalations (even if the part only costs £10) - they have to use a competent person. Why should electrical instalations be any different ?

John Neal
Building Control Officer

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