If you’ve felt your building control workload change shape over the past couple of years without anyone telling you so, you’re not imagining it.
The forms you need to fill in have multiplied. The sign-offs you need have got harder to gather. And the questions you’re expected to be able to answer if something goes wrong have got a lot more specific.
None of this has happened by accident. It’s the Building Safety Act working its way through the system, one regulation at a time, and it’s reshaping what a building control officer’s typical day looks like. This blog looks at what’s changed, what it’s adding to your plate, and where the right tools can take some of that weight off your shoulders.
What is the Building Safety Act?
The Building Safety Act 2022 is a far-reaching piece of legislation that aims to make homes across the country safer and give homeowners and tenants more rights, powers and protections. It established more rigorous safety standards and strict regulatory frameworks across the lifecycle of residential buildings.
The Act overhauled building regulations in the UK to keep residents safe and hold developers and property owners strictly accountable. It was introduced following the Grenfell Tower inquiry, and it’s the reason almost everything about building control has changed in the past few years.
It introduced a new regulatory body, the Building Safety Regulator, with direct oversight of higher-risk residential buildings, namely those above 18 metres or with seven or more storeys.
For these buildings, a three-gateway approval process now runs alongside the usual stages of planning and building control, with each one requiring detailed evidence before work can proceed.
The Act also created new legal duties around competence, accountability and record-keeping that apply across the board, not just to higher-risk projects.
It established the role of the ‘Principal Designer’ and ‘Principal Contractor’, with clear legal responsibilities attached to each, and it gave residents stronger rights to raise safety concerns during a building’s occupation.
The Building Safety Levy, which we’ll come to shortly, is one of several new obligations that have grown out of this same piece of legislation.
What the Building Safety Act changed for building control
The Act’s headline change was the shift from processes built on professional judgement to ones built on documented evidence. Where you might once have approved work based on experience and a site visit, you’re now expected to show your reasoning, record all your checks and be able to produce a clear evidence trail if anyone asks how or why a decision was made.
For higher-risk buildings, the Building Safety Regulator now sits above the local process, with its own gateway approvals and its own expectations about what a complete application should look like. If you get a submission wrong at gateway one or two, the project won’t move forward you’ve fixed it.
Mandatory reporting is another addition that didn’t exist in the same form before. If you identify a safety issue during construction, there’s now a formal duty to report it, with its own timeframe and paper trail.
None of these changes are difficult to understand or manage individually. But stacked together, they mean every application now generates more documentation, checkpoints and opportunities for something to slip if your systems aren’t built to keep pace.
The Building Safety Levy: a new job on top of the old one
The Building Safety Levy is a good example of how these changes can show up in practice. It’s a Government-mandated charge on new residential developments in England, designed to help fund the remediation of unsafe cladding and other building safety defects.
Unlike a planning or building control fee, the responsibility for calculating, collecting and reporting it sits with local authority building control teams, rather with than central government.
From 1 October 2026, your team will be responsible for checking the gross internal area (GIA) measurements of all eligible developments, calculating the levy fee, collecting payment and filing a quarterly return to MHCLG, on top of everything else you already manage.
This task touches building control, finance and, often, development control, too, which can add more variables into the process, and more opportunities for things to go wrong.
For example, a GIA figure that’s slightly off can lead to a dispute about the fee. A payment that isn’t tracked properly can leave a gap in your quarterly return that takes weeks to untangle.
We’ve covered the detail of BSL compliance elsewhere on our blog, so we won’t go into too much depth here. But the short version is that it’s one more regulatory obligation placed on building control teams that were already stretched before it arrived.
How is this landing on already-stretched teams?
A lot of building control teams are now run with fewer experienced people than the job requires.
Many competent staff have left the profession altogether. Others have moved between authorities, while the knowledge that used to sit with one long-serving inspector or planning officer might now sit with whoever happens to be covering that role.
None of this is about competence. It’s about expecting people to hold more information, across more processes, with less support than they had five years ago.
The other problem is, these new obligations don’t sit neatly within one department or one system. A BSL fee calculation depends on planning data. A quarterly MHCLG return depends on finance confirming the payments. A safety incident report depends on whoever did the site inspection writing it up correctly and getting it logged before the deadline passes.
If your team is still working with outdated tools and software that weren’t designed with any of this in mind, every one of those handoffs is a place where something can go missing. That’s not a sustainable way to run a compliance process that’s only going to get more demanding from here on in.
Why choosing the right software is essential
None of this will get any easier by asking your team to work harder, for longer.
The gap between what’s being asked of building control teams and what their software can do has been growing for years. They need a system that does more of the work for them. That’s where our building control software solutions can help.
Submit-a-Plan gives your applicants a single portal for submissions, payments and information requests. Meanwhile, DataSpace Live runs the back-office, including plan checking, inspections, consultations and case management, all built specifically for building control workflows.
And because they’re part of one connected platform, rather than two systems bolted together, data entered once carries through the whole process instead of needing to be rekeyed at every stage.
For BSL, our purpose-built module sits on top of that same platform. It handles GIA verification, automated fee calculation, payment tracking and quarterly MHCLG reporting as one continuous workflow, with every figure logged and auditable from the point it’s first entered.
And with the Building Safety Act putting more weight on your ability to evidence decisions, having a system that records every check and every sign-off as a matter of course will put you in a far stronger position than trying to reconstruct an audit trail after the fact.
No other provider currently combines a client-facing portal that covers the entire process from submission to completion with a full suite of integrated back-office and compliance tools in one platform. For building control teams trying to meet a growing list of obligations without a growing headcount, that can make a real difference.
The Building Safety Act isn’t going to ease off, and neither is the workload it’s created. So, if you’d like to see how Submit-a-Plan, DataSpace Live and our BSL module work together to create a connected, streamlined end-to-end compliance process, get in touch with our team to arrange a demonstration.