I have been dealing with a number of building control issues recently concerning disabled access to and use of new buildings. The building regulations are subject to Building Control persons who are devolved and no longer part of the LAs in strict terms. These firms live by the fee income from Designers and Clients who are able to work anywhere and use the BC company they feel is most responsive to them, sorry perhaps they would say understands our needs.

When it comes to enforcement of the regulations the BC person signs off the project whether or not it reaches the standard of the approved documents and at that point there is no further action that can be taken against any deficiencies by anybody. The building complies because a certificate has been issued - apparently the BC people, while they meant to ebforce feel they should advise and certainly not argue with a designer who states it is not reasonable to comply with the baseline standards.

Hmm - We could devolve the HSE, make it subject to fee income to survive and sit back and atch standards improve - wellhte government think that is the case for Building Control. So is this the future for HSE. Get a pet enforcing organisation and a sign off where necessary.

Bob

Not so good if you are a slave !

Hands up all us slaves

No offence, It's important to know how you fit in. The above is not so different to what is happening anyway, is it. H&S being constantly undermined and a push to remove /reduce the rights to make claims and to peoples welfare etc.

If someone gets hurt its ok, there are lots of people on the dole that would be happy to replace them. Sorry I know it's a bit of a jaundice view, but when I look around this is what I see at the moment.

Bring on the revolution (slave uprising) or at least Friday fun.

Surely this will not affect the common law of negligence so you will still be able to sue- maybe even the Building Control officer!
This system is reminiscent of the system used to audit a companies accounts ie they are checked by an accountant who is paid by the company. Accountancy companies try to use this auditing job as a way to get more business from their clients, which would suggest that it is in their interest to keep the client sweet.
Of course this process has a poor reputation with loads of financial scandals down to dodgy audits.
Despite knowing that this is a problem, no significant changes have been made to this system for years.

The original post mentioned disabled access, and the whole issue of disability rights and adjustments is one of the most toothless pieces of legislation to hit the statute books. The Equality Act replaced the Disability Discrimination Act, but has repeated the essential weakness of the legislation, in that no-one was made responsible for enforcing it, and it is therefore up to an individual who feels discriminated against to take the offenders to either tribunal or county court. Not surprisingly, there hasn't exactly been a rush to do this; who can afford to take such action? End result is that organisations get away with ignoring the legislation, the retail sector being the worst offender in my experience.

The revelations about building control enforcement don't suggest the situation is going to get better any time soon.

Biker1

Spot on this is how it is.

Alan

But it appears that it is reasonable to design doorways such that they are too small for wheelchairs rather than used the approved document dimensions, or to design parking bays that have no safe zone around them or are too narrow to fully open doors, or entrance porches too small to allow wheelchair users to open the inner doors. Best of all disbled toilets with pans set at the right height for children. Access statements were meant to be just that but are used as a method to evade compliance with baseline standards.

Excellent enforcement model I think for the HSE

Bob