Building control officers spend a surprising amount of their week working on things that have nothing to do with plan-checking or inspections. They often need to chase down documents that were emailed to the wrong department, explain, for the umpteenth time, why an inspection hasn’t been booked yet, or dig through an inbox to work out what was promised in a call from three weeks ago. If you multiply those niggling little tasks across a full caseload, it adds up to a lot of hours that could have gone somewhere more useful.
None of this comes down to your team’s expertise. It comes down to how information moves between your building control officers and the people relying on your service, and how much of that movement depends on someone remembering to pick up the phone or forward an email.
If you get communication right, your building control service will run on clarity rather than chasing. Get it wrong, and even excellent technical work can get buried under complaints, repeated calls and missed updates, however well the plan-checking and inspections are handled. This blog explains how our building control solutions help break down the most common communication barriers.
Why building control communication breaks down so often
Most building control services didn’t design their communication process. It developed over years, application by application, as teams found better ways to handle whatever came up that day.
The problems usually start with fragmentation. An application arrives by email. The supporting documents turn up in a separate message, sometimes from the agent rather than the applicant. A query gets raised by phone and never makes it into a written record. An inspection gets booked through a call to the office rather than through the case file.
Each of these interactions might make sense on its own. Together, unless they’re coordinated, they create a picture nobody can see in full. An officer picking up a case mid-way must reconstruct what’s already been agreed. An applicant ringing for an update might reach whoever’s free, not necessarily the person who knows their case, and get a different answer depending on who they speak to.
This tends to get worse if your team relies on agency staff or covers for colleagues who’ve moved on, which is becoming increasingly common across the sector. Knowledge that lives in an experienced officer’s head or inbox leaves with them, which means the next person has to start piecing things together from scratch.
The applicant is usually the one who notices the gap first, when they’re told something that contradicts what they heard last week.
It’s rarely one dramatic failure that causes a complaint. It’s the accumulation of small ones, like a document that had to be sent twice, an update that never arrived or a phone call that went unanswered for two days. On their own, each is minor. Together, they shape how an applicant or agent judges your entire service.
What applicants and agents want from a building control service
Ask many applicants what frustrates them, and you’ll find it’s rarely the regulations themselves.
It’s not knowing where their application stands and having to ring up to find out.
It’s submitting a document with no confirmation it arrived.
It’s being passed between officers who each ask them to repeat the same background information.
Agents feel this more acutely, because they often manage applications across several local authorities at once, each with its own processes and its own way of doing things.
A consistent way to check status, submit documents and see decisions saves them real time, and it shapes how they view your authority compared with the next one on their list. An agent who can get a straight answer from your service without a phone call is more likely to come back to you, and more likely to recommend you to a client choosing between approved inspectors.
None of this means your applicants want less contact with your officers. They just want contact that’s useful.
Giving your applicants a direct line into the process
Submit-a-Plan gives applicants and agents a shared portal where they can track the status and activity of their application, upload additional or revised documents, and message your authority directly, without a phone call. Notifications go out automatically whenever there’s an update, whether it’s a decision, a request for more information, a report or a certificate ready to view.
None of this replaces the judgement your officers bring to a case. It helps remove the routine parts of communication, such as chasing documents, confirming receipt and checking on progress, so your team’s time can instead go on the parts of the job that need their expertise.
It helps applicants get their answers immediately instead of waiting for a callback, and means your officers don’t get interrupted by as many unnecessary calls or emails.
Keeping officers and applicants working from the same information
The Submit-a-Plan client portal connects to DataSpace Live, our back-office system, rather than sitting as a separate front end. Correspondence, documents and updates flow into the same case record your officers already work from, so nobody’s manually copying information between systems or hunting through an inbox to find what’s been said.
Automatic updates mean your applicants hear about progress without an officer having to remember to tell them. And because the record’s shared, any officer picking up a case can see the full history of contact, what’s been requested, what’s been sent and what’s outstanding, rather than relying on whoever handled it last.
InspectMate, our inspections app, extends this to site visits. Your officers can log photos, comments and results on their phone or tablet, even offline, and it syncs back to DataSpace Live once they’re connected. Applicants then see accurate, timely updates on their inspection without officers having to write it up separately once they’re back at their desk. Given how central inspections are to keeping a case moving, that link between the site and the case file closes one of the biggest communication gaps. It helps cut the delay between a site visit happening and an applicant learning the outcome.
Bringing consultees and third parties into the loop
Communication problems aren’t limited to applicants. Consultees, external plan-checkers and other specialists often get looped in through separate email threads, which creates the same fragmentation, just from a different direction. Documents get sent to the wrong version, comments never make it back into the case file, and there’s no clear record of who’s seen what.
PlanShare gives you a controlled space to share documents and gather comments from consultees and external experts without relying on email. It keeps sensitive documents within that controlled environment, with access set specifically for each case. This can help if you need to bring in external plan-checkers or specialists on a case-by-case basis, since access can be set up quickly, without a lengthy onboarding process for someone who might only be involved in one application.
It also protects you from a consultee’s comments arriving after a decision’s already been made, because their email sat unread in someone’s inbox, a common failure point. A shared, visible workflow makes that far less likely.
What better communication delivers for your building control service
When communication runs through your system rather than scattered across inboxes, phone logs and paper files, the information behind your decisions and your reporting is more complete and easier to trust. That consistency feeds into the regulatory returns and audits building control teams now face more often than they used to.
Given the pressures most building control services are under, such as stretched teams, high officer turnover and growing reliance on agency staff, such consistency has real value.
When contact and case history live in the system rather than in someone’s head, your service holds up when people move on. New starters can pick up a case and see exactly what’s happened, rather than relying on handover notes or guesswork, so your service keeps running at the same standard, regardless of who’s covering it.
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Start by looking at where your service currently loses time and information. That’s usually where the fastest gains sit, and where small changes can make the most visible difference to your officers and the people you serve.
Submit-a-Plan and DataSpace Live work together to close these gaps, giving your team and your applicants a shared, accurate picture of every case from submission through to completion.
If you’d like to see how it could work for your building control service, get in touch with our team for a demo.