The building control process hasn’t kept pace with what’s expected of it.
Many local authorities still run their application processes the way they did a few years ago, with submission as one step, processing as another and compliance bolted on at the end. So, an application arrives, gets passed between people and systems, and somewhere in that chain, things slow down. Documents get attached to emails instead of being stored against the application. Inspectors and planning officers wait on information that’s sitting in someone else’s inbox. Applicants ring up to ask what’s happening because they’ve no way of checking for themselves.
None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when these three stages are treated as separate jobs rather than one connected process.
However, modernising that process isn’t about bolting new tools onto what you’ve already got. It’s about connecting the whole journey, from the moment someone submits an application to the point you issue a certificate of completion. This blog explains how we can help you do it.
Where the current approach breaks down
The friction in your current building control application process tends to show up in the same handful of places, application after application. Once you can see the pattern, it’s easier to see what needs to change.
Applications arrive incomplete, or in file formats that nobody can open. Drawings get sent as separate attachments and must be matched up manually with the right submission. Something’s missing, so you email to ask for it, and then wait.
Behind the scenes, inspectors and back-office staff often work from disconnected systems with no shared view of where an application sits. The same information gets typed in two or three times, once at submission, again when it’s logged for processing and again when it feeds into a report. A single application can mean the same name, address and reference number entered by three different people in three different places.
Your applicants feel it, too. Without a way to track their applications through the system, their default move is to ring or email for an update, which means someone on your team must stop what they’re doing to find the answer.
Multiply that across dozens of live applications and it can create quite the bottleneck. For smaller teams working with fewer people than they need, this is where the risk sits. It’s not a capability problem. After all, your staff know what they’re doing. It’s a capacity problem, and manual processes can eat into that capacity faster than almost anything else.
What impact will the Building Safety Levy have?
The Building Safety Levy comes into force on 1 October 2026. It adds even more pressure to a process that’s already stretched.
From that date, local authority building control teams become responsible for verifying, calculating and collecting levy payments and reporting everything to MHCLG every quarter, on top of managing the day-to-day applications that won’t stop arriving.
It won’t be confined to building control, either. Planning teams will need to confirm whether a development is liable in the first place. Finance teams will need visibility of what’s been invoiced and what’s been collected. If your systems don’t already talk to each other, the BSL gives you a sharp new reason why they need to.
The quarterly return is the part you need to start planning for now. Your first one will come around faster than expected, and if your process for collecting accurate GIA measurements, calculating fees and tracking levy payments isn’t reliable by then, you’ll be fixing it while simultaneously trying to meet the deadline.
What a modern building control application process looks like
A connected building control process can help your local authority build an ongoing relationship with the clients applying to it, where they can see what’s happening at every stage without having to ask.
It should give your applicants one place to submit their application, upload documents, request inspections, make payment and track progress, right through to receiving their certificate.
On your side, it means plan-checking, inspections, consultation and reporting all running from the same data. It means the information entered once at submission carries through automatically, rather than needing to be retyped at every handoff.
For BSL-specific developments, it means GIA measurements taken during plan-checking should feed into the fee calculation, which should, in turn, feed straight into your payment tracking. All of this information, across multiple applications, should then feed straight into your MHCLG return.
It should also give you a proper audit trail. If MHCLG or an applicant ever asks a question, you want the information sitting there, ready to go, so you don’t have to piece it together from multiple sources after the fact.
Some local authorities may be able to get there by linking up the tools they already have. However, many will find their current systems weren’t built to share data this way, no matter how they’re connected. That means moving to a platform built to handle the whole journey from the start.
Getting the right tools behind your team
For local authorities making that move, Submit-a-Plan and DataSpace Live were designed from the outset to run as a single, connected platform rather than two separate products.
Submit-a-Plan has evolved from a simple online channel for submitting building control and planning applications into a full client-facing portal, where your applicants can submit, upload, pay, track and correspond with you, all the way through to completion.
DataSpace Live sits behind it with a suite of integrated back-office tools that handle processing, plan-checking, inspections and consultation from the same shared data, so nothing needs to be re-keyed or chased down separately.
Our BSL module is built on top of these two platforms. It feeds the GIA measurements taken during plan-checking straight into fee calculations, which then feed into payment tracking, and then into your quarterly MHCLG return. You enter the information only once, and it carries through the whole process, with every step logged for when you need to show your workings.
How can Resolution Data Management help?
October isn’t far off, and your first quarterly BSL return will follow close behind it. There’s no reporting deadline pressing on you yet, so now’s a good time to bed in a connected process, to save you from untangling a fragmented one once MHCLG starts asking questions.
So, if you’d like to talk through what our connected, streamlined building control application process could look like for your local authority, get in touch. We’d be happy to show you how it works.