Charnwood Borough Council

The origins of building control date back as far as 1666, when the Great Fire of London raged through the City causing widespread devastation. Literally out of the ashes of that catastrophe, Parliament passed, in 1667, an Act for the rebuilding of London. That Act set out to prevent a re-occurrence of the disaster and for the first time, surveyors, or discreet men as they were known, were appointed to ensure its requirements were not violated.

Following the introduction of further legislation in 1774, District Surveyors (or the first Building Inspectors) emerged. This was followed shortly after by the creation of the District Surveyors Association, which had the remit of ensuring uniformity and interpretation of building legislation throughout London.

With the expansion of the provincial towns during the Industrial Revolution, and the appalling filth and squalor that arose in the larger cities, the need soon emerged to extend the scope of the legislation so that individual corporations, as they were then known, were allowed to make their own building bye-laws. These byelaws typically set down standards in relation to party walls, rights of light, drainage, fire resistance and rudimentary means of escape in case of fire.

Ronan Point Disaster

The story continues with the sequential introduction of Public Health Acts throughout the 19th and 20th centuries which culminated, in 1965, with the introduction of the first national Building Regulations. There were many amendments to these regulations. Quite often, these would follow a major event such as the disaster which occurred at Ronan Point, when the complete corner of a high-rise block of flats collapsed, killing several people, following a localised gas explosion in one of the flats.

A major overhaul of the national Building Regulations took place in 1985, following the introduction of the Building Act 1984. This changed the format of the regulations into a simple catalogue of basic functional requirements for buildings which were in turn supported by codes of practice, known as Approved Documents. These codes enabled prescriptions to be made for building design in far more detail than was previously possible under the statutory instrument configuration of the earlier regulations. This has turned out to be essential today as new requirements for the design of buildings, for instance in response to commitment on the part of the government to address the causes of climate change, are constantly being introduced in an ever increasingly onerous form.

The Building Act 1984 also provided for the emergence of private Approved Inspectors who could operate the Building Control function as an alternative to local authorities. Whilst the introduction of this competition originally resulted in the Building Control function being applied from within the private sector in some cases, the market has now swung heavily back in favour of local authorities as developers have come to realise that the local knowledge and availability of their Building Control Surveyors, together with the fair and impartial manner in which they apply the Building Regulations, cannot be not equalled outside of the public sector.