Updates to Building Height Requirements for Building Control Applications
At Planning Portal, we’re committed to making the Building Control application process as clear, consistent and straightforward as possible. By listening to feedback from users and Building Control Bodies, and keeping pace with changes to legislation and guidance, we continually review and improve our services to ensure they meet the needs of everyone using them. As part of this ongoing work, we’ve reviewed how building heights are referenced and requested within Building Control applications in England
This review, alongside lessons learned from the recent Higher-risk building updates that were recently made in Wales, has resulted in a number of improvements to provide greater clarity and consistency when measuring and recording building heights.
These changes will go live on 6 August and are designed to align our application forms more closely with current legislation and government guidance, while making requirements easier for applicants to understand and complete, provide more consistent guidance and requirements for building height measurement:
- In all applications types, we have updated the content on building height fields to reference the relevant information from either the:
2. In Building Notice and Regularisation Certificate applications, we have removed the “What is the height of the top-most occupied storey?” question as this is not a stated information requirement in legislation, and no definition of how this would be measured is available (unlike the references above).
We have also taken the opportunity to move guidance out of pop-up help text to the specific question field it relates to, ensuring its more visible to users, and appears on the generated PDFs that accompany submissions. These updates will go live on 6th August.
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