Local authority funding of building standards is a serious issue. The fees are not ring fenced and, to speak on behalf of the RICS, I think that the perception is that some local authorities see the fees as a bit of a cash cow—it is a regular income that local authorities can have some of—so the function is not properly resourced.
There was a recession, and the building industry goes up and down through recessions. I have been involved in the industry for 40 years and I can probably name most of them. In a recession, there are pressures on departments to have enough income to cover their budgets and their staff but, when the economy is out of the dip, there is normally a surplus, which is not always spent on providing resources.
All sorts of further complications arise if colleges stop running surveying courses, because there are then no surveyors to recruit, which takes four years to fix. When we come out of a recession, we need someone there, but that person is in training.
Because local authorities tend to have yearly budgets and do not do long-term succession planning, training regimes and apprenticeship regimes are difficult. The RICS and other professional bodies have been looking at somehow helping by working with local authorities on training and maybe modern apprenticeships to try to get more professional people into building standards.
As Gilly Carr said, it is important to have professional people with professional standards; membership of his institute gives the assurance that a member is working to a professional standard, whereas someone who is not qualified—although I am not saying that they do not have a level of expertise—sometimes does not have the professional standard behind them. There are certainly issues with training and budgetary control.
There are huge issues with the fact that, for a huge percentage of building warrant applications that come into a council, the fees are probably less than £250. That will hardly cover the administration nowadays, never mind the technical input, given the computer systems for the registering and grant of the warrant and the process that is involved in leasing computer space off the eBuilding Standards system and others. That alone wipes out the fees, and a council has to do a professional job on top of that.
11:15
The fees at the lower end need to be greatly increased. Some fees for non-domestic buildings could maybe be cut down, but we are speaking primarily today about house building. A 400-unit housing scheme might cost quite a few million pounds—say, £20 million. A £20 million office development could be thoroughly inspected in about half a dozen inspections if it was a shell unit but, for the same fee, an authority could do half a dozen inspections times 400 on a housing scheme.
A different fee structure has to be looked at; fees could be upped at the bottom and cut back a bit at the top. Domestic and non-domestic fees have to be looked at separately and perhaps we need to be a bit more clever there. The situation is difficult, but my view is that any moneys that come into building standards should be kept in that team and its budget.