Building Standards

Assistance to Local Authority Verifiers

The purpose of the Scottish building standards system is to protect the public interest. The system is pre-emptive, designed to check that the proposed building work meets the standards. The role of checking compliance with building standards currently rests with the 32 Local Authorities appointed by Scottish Ministers’ as verifiers i.e. there are no Approved Inspectors or their equivalent in Scotland.

The role of the verifier, generally performed by the Local Authorities’ Building Standards Service, provides an independent check of applications for building warrants to construct or demolish buildings, to provide services, fittings or equipment in buildings, or to convert buildings.

Most Building Standards Services, however, perform a number of additional and wide ranging statutory and non-statutory duties in respect of dangerous buildings, street naming and numbering, houses of multiple occupation, safety at sports grounds etc. This additional and often unpredictable workload can place a strain on the Local Authorities ability to adequately resource their verification role. In order to ensure that the applicants for building warrants receive an effective and efficient service, a number of Local Authorities have appointed Butler & Young Scotland as a Consultant to perform building standards assessment and reporting service on their behalf.

Our assessment and reporting service has been utilised by the Local Authorities for the full range of building warrant applications to construct, convert and demolish. Our assessments have been performed for all building types and uses and includes a number of multi-million pound PFI projects.

Assistance to Applicants/Agents for Building Warrants

Butler & Young Scotland can provide advice and guidance in relation to the Building Standards process in Scotland. We currently act as agent for a number of our clients and apply for Building Warrants to the Local Authority verifier on their behalf.

This service includes a pre-submission assessment of proposals for compliance with the Building (Scotland) Regulations in order to avoid abortive design work at an early stage. Where compliance is not achieved, we can advise on whether the building constitutes a risk to health and safety to those who frequent or use the building and provide economic and effective solutions to remove the risk. The advantage of using Butler & Young Scotland as agent or consultant is our familiarity with Local Authority Building Standards Services, the Building Warrant process and our in-depth knowledge of Scottish Building Regulations.

As such, feedback from our clients suggests, that our involvement in this process has dramatically reduced the approval time for projects, allowing earlier site start and completion dates.