The Building Safety Levy (BSL) comes into force in just a few months. It’s set to add a new layer of coordination to every eligible development that goes through a Registered Building Control Approver (RBCA).
For such sites, getting a single certificate of completion issued will depend on three separate parties. Each will hold a piece of information that the other two need.
The RBCA will manage the application but won’t be able to issue the certificate until the BSL has been paid. The local authority will be responsible for collecting that payment but won’t process the application. And the developer will likely only want to pay the levy per plot as each one sells, not upfront for the whole site.
This is set to create a specific, practical problem for local authorities when the BSL comes into force in October. How do you keep an RBCA-led application moving when the final step depends on something only you can confirm, and you’ve got no natural trigger to tell them when it’s done?
This blog explains where that process might break down and how our building control software solutions can help to fix it.
Who does what?
When a developer submits an application for a BSL-eligible site, they can choose to appoint an RBCA to handle building control rather than using a local authority service.
If they do, from October, the RBCA’s first job will be to send an initial notice to the local authority, registering the site for the levy. From there, the RBCA will take responsibility for the building control side of things. They’ll process the application, carry out the relevant inspections and will eventually be responsible for issuing the certificate of completion.
The local authority’s role will sit elsewhere in the process. You’ll be responsible for validating and collecting the BSL payment from the developer as it becomes chargeable.
It’s a fragmented process, and it will hold together only if the RBCA, the developer and your local authority can see the same information at the same time. Right now, many local authorities can’t provide that visibility.
Where the process might get stuck
The RBCA won’t be able to issue a certificate of completion until the BSL payment has been validated and collected. But collecting that payment will sit with the local authority rather than the RBCA.
On its own, that’s manageable. However, developers will likely only want to pay the levy on a given plot once it’s sold, so payment won’t be made in one lump sum once a whole site has been completed. It will likely happen incrementally, plot by plot, over months or even years.
That will leave the RBCA needing to check the payment status before they can close out each individual unit, and the only way they’ll be able to check is by contacting the local authority directly. On a site with a handful of units, that can be a minor nuisance. On a large development with two or three hundred plots, it could create a constant stream of queries landing on your team, with each one needing someone to check a record and reply. Certificates will sit waiting on answers you could give in seconds if the information is visible from the start. Developers, meanwhile, will need to chase both sides for updates, because neither the council nor the RBCA will be able to give them the full picture on their own.
RBCAs probably won’t be appointed on every BSL-eligible application. Plenty of developers will stick with the council’s own building control service throughout. Where RBCAs are chosen for larger sites, the problem of coordinating information across three parties will be concentrated where it’s hardest to manage. Developments with the most plots will have inspections running in parallel and more individual payments to track and confirm.
So, if your process for handling RBCA queries relies on someone checking a spreadsheet or a case file each time, that’s where it will come under the most pressure.
Giving all parties visibility
The solution isn’t about redesigning who’s responsible for what. It’s about giving the developer, the RBCA and your building control team the same visibility into where each plot stands, so nobody needs to ask. That’s where our software solutions can help.
Through the Submit-a-Plan client portal, every BSL-eligible site is listed and broken down to individual plot level, allowing everyone involved to update and track progress against each plot, rather than the whole development.
It means an RBCA working through an application will be able to see, at a glance, whether a BSL payment has been collected on the plot they’re about to close out, without picking up the phone.
The developer will be able to see which of their plots are cleared for certification and which are still pending, without waiting for an email back from either party.
And your team can update the dashboard as work progresses, including the moment a payment lands, and send an update to the RBCA, so they can issue the certificate.
The process from start to finish
Our building control software doesn’t change the process. However, it will change how visible each step is to the people who need to act on it:
- The developer chooses to appoint an RBCA rather than using the council’s building control service.
- The RBCA sends an initial notice to the local authority, registering the site for BSL.
- The RBCA and the council work through their separate responsibilities, both updating progress on the same dashboard, down to individual plot level.
- The council validates and collects payment as each plot is sold and becomes chargeable.
- Once payment is confirmed, the RBCA can issue the certificate of completion and close the job.
Throughout the process, all three parties can check progress by plot, from the initial notice through to the certificate being issued, without needing to contact anyone else for an update.
How Resolution DM supports this
This process works because the dashboard sits inside Submit-a-Plan, the same portal many local authorities, developers and RBCAs already use to handle their building control applications. There’s no separate system to log into and no extra login to remember. When your team updates payment status against a plot, the system will send an automated notification to the RBCA so it can move ahead and issue the certificate. The trigger for that final step in the process will come directly from the data you’re already recording.
Plenty of tools can handle the submission side of a building control application, and many can handle the back-office case management. But no other solutions connect the two as a seamless, end-to-end process, so that a payment recorded on your side becomes visible, in real time, to any third parties working on the same plot.
Submit-a-Plan, DataSpace Live and our Building Safety Levy module are built as one connected system, which makes tracking the progress of a building control application in such granular detail possible without your team becoming the go-between for every query an RBCA or developer raises.
For your BSL-eligible applications, it removes a layer of admin that keeps all relevant parties informed of the same facts, based on live data, via a shared, easy-to-use client-facing dashboard.
So, if you’d like to see how our building control solutions could work for your local authority, we’re happy to walk you through it. Get in touch today to arrange a demo with our team.