Building control has always involved scrutiny. However, since the introduction of the Building Safety Act, the shape of that scrutiny has changed.
Decisions that used to sit on an officer’s judgement must now have a documented rationale behind them. Inspections that used to be written up whenever there was time now need to stand as evidence. The Building Safety Regulator can ask for information on a case months after it closed, and your team needs to be able to answer without a scramble through old emails and paper files.
Scrutiny isn’t a periodic event anymore. It’s baked into the job and present in every case.
This blog explains where that pressure sits, what’s driving it, and how our building control software can help your team stay ahead of it.
Where regulatory scrutiny is landing hardest
Some parts of the building control process face more scrutiny than others.
Higher-risk building work means more paperwork and less room for error, starting with how each project gets classified. Get that wrong early in the process, and the problems tend to surface much later, often at the point when they’re hardest to unpick.
Officer competency and registration under the RBCA and RBI framework is now something you need to evidence, not just hold. Every decision on a case, from an approval to a request for further information, needs a clear audit trail showing who made it, when and on what basis, with the supporting evidence attached.
You’ll feel this most sharply when a query comes in that you didn’t expect. For example, a request for information from the BSR lands, and someone needs to reconstruct a decision from six months ago. Or an applicant challenges a decision and asks to see what evidence it was based on. Or an inspection record has a gap in it because the officer who wrote it left your authority before anyone thought to check.
None of these are hypothetical. They’re the everyday realities of running a building control service under the current rules, and each one takes time your team probably doesn’t have to spare, pulling officers away from live casework to go digging through historic files.
The new quarterly reporting requirements, shortly to be implemented as part of the Building Safety Levy (BSL), will add another layer on top of this. Where compliance evidence used to sit in individual case files, reviewed only if something went wrong, you’ll soon need to pull it together regularly, check it and submit it to HMCLG in a format that leaves no room for guesswork. If that evidence isn’t structured consistently across your caseload, someone will end up doing that work manually every quarter, which is a poor use of an experienced officer’s time and an easy place for errors to creep in.
The gap between what’s expected and what teams can deliver
Most building control teams are running with fewer permanent staff than they need, filling gaps with agency staff who move between authorities every few months.
Case histories can get patchy when the person who opened a file isn’t the person who closes it, and the handover notes only ever capture part of the picture.
It means local knowledge that used to sit with one experienced officer must now be written down somewhere everyone can find it, because that officer might not be there next quarter.
This isn’t a competence problem. The officers doing this work know what good practice looks like, and most of them would happily tell you the standard they’re expected to meet.
The problem is that scrutiny assumes continuity, and continuity is what many building control teams struggle to hold onto. When your evidence trail depends on one person’s inbox, their filing habits or their memory of a site visit, it won’t survive them leaving your team.
Add in the volume of casework most building control teams are now carrying, and it’s easy to see why compliance can slip down the priority list on any given day. When you’re trying to cover site visits, plan checks and applicant queries with an already overstretched team, the administrative side of compliance is often the part that gets squeezed first. It’s not because anyone’s cutting corners deliberately. It’s because there are only so many hours in a working week and the paperwork never feels as urgent as the next inspection.
What good compliance looks like
Meeting the current standard means every decision on a case must be timestamped, attributable and traceable back to the evidence that supports it, in a format that makes sense to someone who wasn’t in the room when it was made.
It means inspection findings need capturing at the time of the visit, not reconstructed from notes scribbled in a van on the way to the next site.
It means consultations and shared documents need to leave a record of who saw what and when, so there’s no dispute later about whether something was raised, or whether a response was ever received.
And it means your data should be structured well enough that producing a report for MHCLG or answering a regulator’s request is a case of pulling existing records together, not building a new document from scratch, under pressure.
None of this is about adding extra steps to your process for the sake of compliance. It’s about making sure the record of what you did and why already exists by the time anyone asks to see it.
Building consistency across your team
Much of this comes down to how consistently your team works, rather than how well any individual officer performs. If a senior officer records inspections one way and an agency temp covering annual leave does it differently, you’ll end up with a case file where the standard drops depending on who was on shift that week. Whoever picks that file up next, whether that’s a colleague, a manager reviewing progress or an officer taking over a caseload partway through the process, needs it to make sense without a phone call to whoever wrote it.
Getting that consistency right relies on giving your team a system that records evidence the same way every time, regardless of who’s using it, where they’re working from or how long they’ve been in the role. That’s the standard your process should be able to hold to, whether it’s your longest-serving officer or someone who started last month. Our building control software is built around that standard.
DataSpace Live holds every case as a single, connected record, so the decision an officer made, the evidence behind it and the correspondence around it all sit in one place rather than scattered across different systems and inboxes. If a regulator asks a question about a case that was closed six months ago, the answer’s already there, attributed to the officer who made the call and backed by the documents they used.
InspectMate takes that further at the point of inspection. Officers can record findings, photos and comments on site, including offline where there’s no signal, and sync them straight into DataSpace Live once they’re back online. There’s no gap between the visit and the record of it, and no reliance on notes being written up later, from memory, once the officer’s back at their desk and onto the next job.
PlanShare handles the consultation side, giving you a documented trail of who reviewed a plan, what they said and when, so nothing depends on someone remembering an email exchange from months ago. And our Submit-a-Plan client portal gives applicants visibility into where their case stands, which cuts down the chasing that eats into officer time and adds friction to a process that’s already under pressure. Because everything runs from the same underlying data, producing evidence for a regulator or pulling together a quarterly return doesn’t mean starting from scratch. The information already exists, structured and attributed, ready to be reported.
It’s one connected system rather than a set of separate tools bolted onto each other. Information entered once carries through the whole case, from submission to inspection to reporting, so nothing gets lost in the handoffs between stages, and nothing needs re-entering by a different officer at a different point in the process.
Scrutiny under the Building Safety Act isn’t going to ease off. The teams best placed to handle it will be the ones whose systems can already answer the questions before they’re asked. If you’d like to see how our software supports that in practice, get in touch with our team to arrange a demonstration.