Building standards - building warrant fees: consultation

Part 2: High Risk Buildings (HRBs)

Overview

The Compliance Plan Approach work stream is establishing a new Compliance Process for High Risk Buildings through the introduction of a Building Warrant Compliance Plan, a Compliance Plan Manager (CPM) role and a pre-application assessment process. Going forward the Compliance Plan process will also be tailored to suit all other building warrant applications.

High Risk Buildings (HRB) are defined as:

• Domestic Building or Residential Building with any storey at a height of more than 11 metres above the ground.
• Educational establishments (Schools, colleges and universities), community/sport centres and non-domestic buildings under local authority control/where they have an interest in a building.
• Hospitals.
• Residential Care buildings.

The CPM role is currently being tested and it is envisaged that this role will be introduced through legislation when the work of the Compliance Plan Approach work stream nears completion in 2025/26

The research on building warrant fees concluded that:

"the current fee model may not serve the requirements of the building standards verification service in the future. The model is unable to add charges for specific services and the introduction of compliance plans for HRBs cannot be targeted at the projects which incur the additional costs. It is also anticipated that, over time, strengthened compliance procedures for HRBs will filter down to non-HRB projects which will have an impact on the work of verifiers across the system. Revising the current structure to include a separate fee structure for HRBs would allow the increase in fees to cover the additional costs of the compliance plan to be restricted to the projects where the requirements for verification work will be more onerous."

It will place an additional cost on verifiers to cover:

• Pre-applications meetings with the CPM, applicant and their design team.
• Routine and regular engagement with the CPM to support the delivery of a fully achieved Building Warrant Compliance Plan.
• Pro-active monitoring of such projects and if necessary, enforcement to check and control that:

- work has not started before approval of the warrant (at each warrant stage); and

- the building is not occupied or in use without permission.

• Additional ad-hoc inspections and the planned site visits/checks and verification work in line with the compliance plan.
• Completion Certificate Submissions are submitted legally and competently.

This proposal introduces a separate, enhanced fee for building warrant applications for High Risk Buildings to cover additional costs experienced by verifiers on the introduction of the HRB compliance plan process including the requirement to pro-actively monitor these applications.

Question 2.1 - Do you support the introduction of an enhanced fee for High Risk Building warrant applications?

Strongly support

Support

Neither

Do not support

Strongly do not support

Please select only one answer and provide your reasoning in the box below.