The Building Control service provides an effective and professional service that is also excellent value for money.
Our responsibilities include:
- suitable access and use of the buildings
- ensuring that buildings meet statutory health and safety requirements
- ensuring conservation of the buildings' fuel and power
- dangerous structures
- demolitions
- street naming and numbering
- providing advice to Safety at Sports Grounds advisory groups
We operate a quality management system assured to ISO 9001:2008.
As well as carrying out application approvals and inspections, we can offer you assistance in many areas in order to make your project quicker and easier.
These include:
- early consultation with professionally qualified surveyors, even before you submit your formal application
- the ability to respond to same-day inspection requests – when received before 10am
- local knowledge and experience with access to detailed historical records
- close working with other departments of the council and the fire officer
We also publish a wide range of leaflets and guidance notes.
Changes to charges
A new scheme of charges came into effect on 1 October 2010.
New legislation has recently been introduced to allow local authorities to fix their charges in a scheme based on the full recovery of their costs in providing a building control service for each project.
The new legislation allows us to provide greater flexibility in setting our charges with the aim of providing a more accurate and fair system. They also introduce more transparency into the charge-setting process.
The previous charges regulations had numerous limitations such as method of charging for building work based primarily on the estimated cost of the project, without consideration of the actual amount of building control input required.
Local authorities now have the ability to set standard charges, typically for small residential projects and domestic extensions or alterations, and to individually determine charges for larger, more complex schemes. Individually determined charges will be calculated on a project-by-project basis and will be based on a number of factors including:
- estimated construction cost
- floor area of the building or extension
- proposed use of building
- estimated duration of construction work
- anticipated number of inspections required
- any accreditations held by the builder or design team
- the nature of the building work and whether innovative or high risk construction methods are to be used
Cambridge City Building Control has been working in consultation with neighbouring authorities in Cambridgeshire to ensure wherever possible that the categories we set standard charges for are as consistent as possible throughout the county.
New guidance notes on charges are now available for domestic charges and non-domestic charges; these can be downloaded from the guidance notes page.
Our building control fee calculator has been updated ato reflect these changes.
If you have any queries on our new scheme of charges please email us at buildingcontrol@cambridge.gov.uk.
Local Authority Building Control
We have a number of formal partnerships with agents and developers in the city through the Local Authority Building Control (LABC) partnership scheme, which enables us to provide advice and plan examinations for our partners on developments throughout England and Wales.
Considerate Contractor scheme
We also operate the Considerate Contractor scheme designed to promote greater awareness, higher standards of care and encourage contractors to take pride in their public image.
Contact
Email the Building Control team at buildingcontrol@cambridge.gov.uk or telephone 01223 457118.
The postal address is Cambridge City Building Control, Environment Department, Cambridge City Council, PO Box 700, Cambridge CB1 0JH.
The emergency out-of-hours telephone number is 01223 457457.
Feedback
We welcome general feedback on our service in order that we can continually make improvements to our service.
If you have a complaint about the Building Control service we would also like to hear from you. Please contact Ian Boulton, Building Control Manager, at the above address.
Alternatively, read about the council's formal complaints procedure.
Regulations
The Building Regulations 2010 and the Building (Approved Inspectors etc.) Regulations 2010 were laid before Parliament on 9th September 2010 and come into force on 1st October 2010.
The 2010 Regulations in both cases consolidate the Building Regulations 2000 and Building (Approved Inspectors etc.) Regulations 2000 incorporating all of the amendments made since 2000.
Both sets of Regulations have been renumbered and reordered to make them easier to use and with a more logical structure. A correspondence table showing the previous number of a regulation against the new 2010 regulation number, for each set of Regulations, can be found at Annex A and Annex B of Circular 07/201.
The Approved Documents and Compliance Guides remain valid for the purposes of the 2010 Regulations and CLG will be issuing Amendment Slips to allow people to follow the new regulation numbers. The online versions will be amended as soon as possible.
Any enquires relating to CLG Circular should be emailed to enquiries.br@communities.gsi.gov.uk.
