Building Standards
Making a good quality building warrant application
August 27, 2021 by Simon Moore 1 Comment | Category Building Standards, Futures Board, Procedures
We have published guidance on what you need to know to make a quality building warrant application. This post covers the reason for developing new national guidance, a summary of what it covers and what we hope it will achieve.
Developing the guidance
The compliance plan is one of seven workstreams overseen by the Building Standards Futures Board. The project considers developing a new approach that will provide greater assurance that compliance with building regulations is achieved from the pre-building warrant application stage through to completion.
To support this work more broadly, we considered how to improve the quality and type of information shared between building warrant applicants and verifiers. The guidance has been developed with participation from stakeholders in the construction industry, verifiers, approved certifiers, architects and applicants for a building warrant.
Our engagement with stakeholders sought views on what attributes are required to form a quality application and to steer our work on developing straight-forward guidance that will be useful in practice. To check and validate our thinking we carried out an online survey with verifiers to gather views on the common quality issues with applications and what key information is often missing.
Purpose of the guidance
This guidance is intended for all applicants and agents submitting a building warrant application. It provides procedural and technical checklists and promotes using competent professionals to help produce a quality application as they have in-depth knowledge and understanding of the system, process and regulations.
A good quality application is essential for effective processing of building warrants, required before construction work can start. Providing the right type of information with an application will help the verifier check that the proposed building work meets the building regulations and may reduce the time taken for a warrant to be granted.
Content and scope
The guidance provides an overview of the building standards system including the roles and responsibilities of those involved, the building warrant process, and helpful information on what procedural and technical details are important when making an application.
The guidance is particularly helpful for small domestic projects, however, it is a useful resource for all projects regardless of type of work.
What we hope it will achieve
We hope this guidance will help to:
- Improve the quality of information submitted with building warrant applications made to verifiers;
- Provide clarity on the building standards system, procedures, roles and responsibilities;
- Provide consistency of approach in the information required by verifiers to approve building warrants; and
- Reduce turnaround times for verifiers to issue first reports.
The guidance sits alongside the current suite of building standards procedural guidance including the procedural handbook (third edition, version 1.6), the customer journey and help guides on the eBuilding Standards portal.
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