Building control at a turning point: what the Independent Panel’s report means for the sector’s digital future

Nine years on from the Grenfell Tower fire, the Building Control Independent Panel led by Dame Judith Hackitt has delivered a clear assessment: despite significant progress since 2017, the current system still has structural weaknesses that prevent it from delivering the independent, consistent and proactive assurance the public has a right to expect. 

The panel’s recommendations point towards fewer, larger and more independent building control bodies, alongside stronger national oversight. But there is another recommendation that deserves equal attention: the need for a stronger digital backbone, underpinned by clear data standards, interoperability and visible accountability. 

In our view, this is not simply a supporting recommendation. It is the foundation on which the wider reforms will depend. 

The diagnosis: fragmentation, conflict, and uneven capacity 

The panel’s central critique is structural, building control today is delivered across nearly 250 local authority Building Control Approvers (BCAs) and around 80 Registered Building Control Approvers (RBCAs), operating under commercial competition with markedly uneven capacity. 

The report is candid that in some areas statutory oversight is no longer being met at all, and that the industry faces client pressure that can dilute inspection rigour and appetite for enforcement. The panel’s conclusion is that the system relies too heavily on individual professionalism to compensate for problems that are structural in nature. 

The five recommendations 

1. A single, independent statutory building control system for non-HRB (high risk building) work – legislating for a unified system built on independence, national consistency and transparent accountability. 

2. Removal of dutyholder choice from statutory building control, moving toward independent allocation of regulatory work based on competence, capacity and risk rather than client preference. A transitional model would allow dutyholders to express a preference, with final allocation held by the new bodies. 

3. Consolidated Building Control Bodies (BCBs) – under the panel’s preferred model, the statutory building control function currently sitting inside LA BCA teams would move out into a new, separately governed BCB – but in practice this looks like a transfer, with LA BCA teams and their funding moving into the new bodies rather than being displaced by them, and local authorities that want to keep delivering building control commercially can still do so, just without holding the statutory decision-making themselves. 

4. A defined role for the Single Construction Regulator (SCR), with oversight, registration, performance monitoring, HRB decisions and enforcement, and consideration of splitting HRB decision-making from oversight to remove conflicts within the BSR. 

5. Strengthened national enforcement capability, giving the SCR specialist legal, investigatory and technical capacity to support consistent enforcement across England. 

The panel is explicit that consolidation into BCBs will require primary legislation and a carefully sequenced, multi-year transition. But the direction of travel – toward independent allocation, fewer and larger bodies, and centralised oversight – is now firmly on the government’s agenda, and MHCLG’s initial response accepted the “longstanding structural challenges” the panel identified. 

The recommendation that shouldn’t get lost: a stronger digital backbone 

Amid the debate about dutyholder choice and BCB consolidation, one of the panel’s five design principles is easy to underweight but arguably foundational to all the others: transparency and data – “a stronger digital backbone, underpinned by clear data standards, interoperability and visible accountability.” 

Every principle in the report depends on it: 

• Independent allocation of work only functions if there’s a consistent, trusted data spine showing capacity, competence and risk across providers – something no single LA BCA or RBCA can maintain in isolation. 

• Consistency by design requires that similar work is visible and comparable, wherever it’s undertaken – which is a data and interoperability problem before it’s a policy problem. 

• National oversight by the BSR and SCR is only as good as the data flowing into it. A regulator cannot manage performance it cannot see. 

• Public confidence and accountability rest on transparent reporting, which in turn rests on data that is captured once, consistently, and reliably at the point of application. 

Put simply: you cannot legislate your way to a single, trusted regulatory system on top of a fragmented data landscape. The governance reforms the panel proposes are the visible structure; the digital backbone is the foundation it has to sit on. 

Indeed, we echoed many of the report’s findings in our response to Government’s ‘Building control: charges, notices and certificates’ consultation at the start of the year, including calls for: 

• A wider ability for local authorities to recover reasonable costs; 

• A level playing field for building control approvers, including requirements to publish charging schemes 

• Modern digital online services based on standardised processes and data 

• Monitoring to ensure the system operates fairly, efficiently, and transparently 

This isn’t a future aspiration – it’s already over halfway there 

The panel’s “transparency and data” principle describes a destination: a single national front door, consistent data standards, and one point of truth that both public and private providers plug into, rather than each maintaining its own version of the same process. 

It’s worth being clear that, for building control, this isn’t a blank page. The same standardisation that transformed the planning application service over the past two decades has already been extended into building control, and today’s shared national platform is used by over 50% of local authorities in England for building control application handling, alongside RBCAs operating through the same system. 

The digital backbone the panel is calling for isn’t something the sector needs to invent from scratch – it’s something the sector is already partly running on, and the job now is extending and deepening that, not starting it. 

A system to build on 

The Building Safety Levy, coming into force on 1 October 2026, is a useful near-term test of what that shared infrastructure is for. 

From that date, every ‘full plans’ application or ‘initial notice’ will need to capture levy liability information accurately at the point of submission, with local authorities acting as collecting authorities regardless of who did the inspection work. 

Where the platform is already in place, that’s a configuration and rollout exercise on existing shared infrastructure, rather than a data-standards problem being solved for the first time under deadline pressure. 

Planning Portal will be adding a ‘Building Safety Levy’ question to ‘Full plans’ applications to ensure that logic is in place to determine the case-by-case information requirements based on the latest legislation and guidance, and that these requirements are fulfilled via mandatory form fields and in supporting information. 

This will provide local authorities and RBCAs with the key details they require to carry out their functions in a compliant manner. 

We are also working on a modern API and data standard to ensure that a complete set of application information and metadata, including BSL, is available to facilitate automation and realise digital efficiencies.