Decisions, contraventions, enforcements and regularisation
If we reject your plans, you can re-submit them, with amendments, to make them comply with Building Regulations. Alternatively, you can appeal to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities against our decision on your application to:
- Reject plans
- Refuse to grant an application for relaxation of Building Regulations
- Add a condition to the granting of an application for relaxation
- Serve a contravention notice in respect of defective work
If you do wish to appeal for any of the above reasons (except for a contravention notice), you must be lodge this with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities within 56 days of the date of our notification or decision and work must not have commenced.
Read building regulations approval appeals and determination on GOV.UK. As you must check if you need approval before you construct or change buildings in certain ways.
Contravention of building regulations
Building control contraventions or breaches fall into the following categories:
- Failure to deposit plans before commencing building works.
- Failure by the builder to give the required notice at specified stages of the work.
- Failure to comply with the requirements of the regulations in carrying out building work on site.
Reporting a building regulation breach
Contact Building Control on the details below to report a in building regulations breach if you suspect someone of failure to comply with any of the above.
We have the legal power to deal with each of the failures in the list. However, we see legal action as a last resort, after all other possible ways of resolving a contravention have failed.
Contravention notice
If you receive a contravention notice from us, there are four courses of action open to you:
- Compliance with the Notice. This will involve altering or removing the defective work, usually the Notice will give you 28 days to do this.
- Challenging the Notice.
- Appealing to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
- Applying for relaxation of the contravened regulations.
See appeal an enforcement notice on GOV.UK.
Regularisation
If you have carried out unauthorised work without submitting any plans, or giving us notice, you can apply for a Regularisation Certificate.
Apply for a regularisation certificate
Complete the AF-01 v1 - Building Regulations application form (DOCX: 103Kb / 2 pages) to apply for a regularisation certificate and pay the appropriate building control application fee.
See scheme of charges on the building control forms and fees web page to find out the appropriate building control application fee.
We will carry out inspections to ascertain whether, or not, the work complies with Building Regulations. This may involve the opening up of works and carrying out tests and/or sampling of materials. We will then notify you if we require any further work to bring the building to the required standard. We cannot accept Regularisation applications for electrical work.
When the work has been satisfactorily completed, or if no further work is necessary, we will issue a Regularisation Certificate. Whilst there is no legal requirement to apply for a Regularisation Certificate, there is a definite legal requirement to comply with Building Regulations. Failure to do so is not only an offence, but may create problems when the property changes ownership.