Building Regulations

Building Regulations division deals with Building Regulations, which ensure the health and safety of people in and around buildings by providing functional requirements for building design and construction. To comply with Building Regulations, you, your builder or architect simply need to contact your local authority Building Control Officer who will send you a form to complete which will include details and diagrams of the intended work. These are national regulations. What this means is that England and Wales have one set of regulations, Scotland another) but are administered by local authorities.

After you return this to your local authority you will be either receive Approval or a request for further information/clarification. Around 2 million installations of new and replacement glazing happen every year. If all of them went through the normal Building Regulations application process it would place an enormous burden on local authorities.

The regulations also promote energy efficiency in buildings and contribute to meeting the needs of disabled people. When you plan to build, extend or alter a property you will generally need to consider 2 separate issues - Building Regulations and planning Permission. The majority of building projects are required to comply with Building Regulations (known as Standards in Scotland). They ensure the health and safety of people using buildings and to provide for energy conservation and access to and from buildings.

Of course construction businesses and their customers can using local authority building control procedures or an approved inspector to make sure that work is compliant with the building regulations.

The Government introduced competent persons schemes to allow individuals and enterprises to self-certify that their work complies with the Building Regulations as an alternative to submitting a building notice or using an approved inspector. We shall seek more details of Building Regulations Self-certify scheme in the next part of the article.

The prinicpal responsibility to make it sure that the work complies with building regulations lies with the person carrying it out. So it's a builder's responsibility going by the building regulations. You need to be careful that your builder is taking the necessary steps because if the regulations are vioalted, you may face the music and may even be asked to make alterations or even to pull down the construction.

To ensure that the work is done properly without an unreasonable increase in the administrative and financial burden on installers and property owners. A national scheme, which allows installation companies that meet certain criteria for Building Regulations self-certify that their work complies with the Building Regulations, is known as FENSA.

It stands for Fenestration Self-Assessment. The Glass & Glazing Federation set up FENSA. It also updates local authorities of all completed FENSA installations and issue certificates to householders confirming compliance, and maintains a national database of all its registered installers.

Building Regulations self-certification has significantly enhanced compliance with the requirements of the Building Regulations, reduce costs for firms joining recognized schemes, and promote training and competence within the industry. It should also help tackle the problem of 'cowboy builders', and assist local authorities with enforcement of the Building Regulations.

The principles of self-certification are based on giving people who are competent in their field the ability to self-certify that their work complies with the Building Regulations without the need to submit a building notice and thus incurring local authority inspections or fees.

Once the Building Control Officer is satisfied with your plans you will receive Building Control Approval (or a Warrant). This process usually takes approx. 6-8 weeks. Once the building work is completed, it is likely that the Building Control Officer will want to inspect the work to ensure that it complies with the approval granted. It is important to note that there will be major changes to the Scottish system on 1 May 2005.