Building control fees!
Author
Discussion

silentbrown

Original Poster:

10,748 posts

144 months

Thursday 16th April
quotequote all
We're having some work done on the house which needed BC signoff, and I'm gobsmacked at the fees.

I was expecting a couple of hundred at worst, but £600 for a visit that took five minutes at most seems ridiculous.

Basically over 10% of the job cost!

smokey mow

1,385 posts

228 months

Friday 17th April
quotequote all
Administration of application, uploading application to Document management system, creation of invoice processing of payment. – 45 minutes

Receipt of inspection request, booking inspection in surveyors diary and uploading application documents to surveyors’ tablet on day of inspection. – 15 minutes

Travel time to and from property for inspection – Average 30 minutes in urban areas or 45 minutes if a rural property

Time on site undertaking site inspection – 15 minutes

Booking up and recording of inspection notes and photos on DMS in a format compliant with the BSR’s operational standards rules – 15 minutes

Generating of completion documentation and sending copy of completion certificate to dutyholders – 15 minutes

Closing application file and maintaining record for 15 years in accordance with local government document retention policy for future land charges searches – 15 minutes

Total 2hours 45 minutes

At £175/hour which is a common hourly rate for Building Control in the public and private sector that’s £481 +Vat or £577 with the Vat.

HTH

JimM169

818 posts

150 months

Friday 17th April
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Sounds like most of that could be done by the office junior and save the customer a few quid.............but it's the council so no doubt involved 127 different people

Lotobear

8,975 posts

156 months

Friday 17th April
quotequote all
I recently ran a one off housing revite for a local social housing landlord.

Building notice fee was over £1k - a spotty faced youth turned up on site twice, didn't have a clue what he was looking at (thought an excavation for a new drain connection was for underpinning FCS!!) but acted as if he was some kind of construction god.

Never did a final inspection, just asked for photos and we finally got a completion certificate.

A complete and utter rip off. LA building control seems to be an utter st show everwhere now. I recall the days when you had pragmatic (many ex trade) BCO's who were helpful and would work around issues rather than taking a 'computer says no' approach by citing the section and sub section of the AD's. We now seem to have a team of inflexible college grad technocrats lacking the basic knowledge of real world construction, it's rank bad value IME.


WindyMills

294 posts

181 months

Friday 17th April
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They are literally going extinct, so they are priced accordingly.

silentbrown

Original Poster:

10,748 posts

144 months

Friday 17th April
quotequote all
smokey mow said:
At £175/hour which is a common hourly rate for Building Control in the public and private sector that s £481 +Vat or £577 with the Vat.

HTH
A typical BCO is earning ~£50K/year, so around £30 per working hour? His/her £175 "hourly rate" is there to cover all the back-office expenses - you can't charge all those at the same rate.

LooneyTunes

9,284 posts

186 months

Friday 17th April
quotequote all
The thing is, the BR fees are so inconsistent.

Did a building conversion and extension at home recently and they'd quoted about £450. Bearing in mind it needed foundation work, steels, drainage, insulation, etc, it worked out stupidly cheap on a "per visit" basis.

In fact the BCO who came out the second time essentially told us to just crack on and not bother them until it was done.

Our local BCOs are pretty good, and very responsive, but the planners... whole different story.