Private building control companies

The Council's Building Control Service is aware there are several Approved Inspectors (these are private Building Control companies) whose professional indemnity insurance has expired.

This means these uninsured private companies cannot continue to lawfully provide a Building Control service. 

What to do if your Approved Inspector no longer has the insurance cover required to trade

If your building project is being administered by an Approved Inspector who can no longer provide the Building Control service for you, then you will need to follow this procedure: 

• Either you, as home owner, or an agent acting on your behalf, such as the Approved Inspector or the person carrying out the works, must cancel the existing Initial Notice which was originally lodged with Chichester District Council Building Control. This can be done by completing the following Section 52 Cancellation Notice and returning it to Chichester District Council Building Control:

Section 52 - Notice of cancellation by person carrying out the work form (Word doc, 16 KB)

• Once the Cancellation Notice has been completed, providing works have not commenced, then you may choose either Chichester District Council Building Control or a different Approved Inspector, to administer the building control function of your building project.
• However, if work has started on site, any work not covered by a lawfully issued Final Certificate must - by law - be passed back to Chichester District Council to ensure compliance with the Building Regulations. When passing uncompleted work back to Chichester District Council and after issuing your Section 52 Cancellation Notice, you will need to lodge a Reversion application to Chichester Building Control. When doing so, please use the following form:

Building control - Reversion application form (Word doc, 94 KB)

• When work is 'reverted' to Chichester Building Control, you will need to provide us with as much information as possible to help us determine how the work (so far) complies with the relevant Building Regulations. This would include any plans, documents, structural designs, site inspection records etc your Approved inspector might have made available to you.

Fees

• Please note that all local authorities are obliged by law to carry out this process and at the same time levy a fee for work that is reverted to them.
• Please note that the cost for processing a reversion project will be assessed as an  individually determined charge based on the extent of work.
• Any information you have about inspections undertaken so far, plus any building plans, structural calculations or photographs of the work in progress etc, will be of great assistance and may help to limit our fees. 
• Once we have the information as described above, then a highly experienced and qualified Building Control Surveyor will assess all of these details etc and advise you of the next steps in the process. 
• If we cannot ascertain compliance with any particular aspects of the building work, we may have to ask for certain elements to be uncovered for inspection. Naturally we aim to keep any such possibility to a minimum.