BICOF announcement

By April 2024 Building Control will become a regulated profession. The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) will establish a register of building inspectors, across both public and private sector which opens in October 2023; all practising building control professionals will have to be registered by April 2024.

LABC welcomes the launch of the Building Inspector Competence Framework (BICoF) 

For many LABC members, this is seen as an opportunity to raise the status of the profession and prove their undoubted competence and professionalism once and for all.

Following the Grenfell tragedy, Dame Judith made a very clear statement about the need for step change and a new culture of measured competence. She challenged industry and in particular building control to “get on with it, don’t wait to be told what to do”. LABC responded to this by establishing the Building Safety Competence Foundation (BSCF) as a vehicle to enable all building control surveyors to prove their competency under UKAS accredited ISO17024, regardless of sector or level of experience.

There has been wide public support for the BSCF, which is recognised in the Building Inspector Competence Framework (BICoF) consultation as one means of proving competence, and again in an article written by Sandra Ashcroft, HSE / BSR Competence Workstream Lead, published by the RICS on the 16th February 2023. 

When the role of local authority building control working as part of the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) for the Building Safety Regulator became apparent, LABC applied to the Government for New Burdens grant funding (SR20). This funding was to prepare public service building control teams and to ensure surveyors were up to speed with technical and legislative requirements by providing access to and funding for relevant training, and to validate competence in order to prepare surveyors for Registration.

This grant funding was provided for all surveyors in teams with HRBs; LABC supplemented that funding for teams without HRBs and our teams in Wales, in order that all members had access to the same opportunities. The training at levels 4,5 and 6 is being rolled out online and validation assessments are being made available to all LABC surveyors as part of this funding. 

The LABC Board of Directors has recently agreed to provide further funding for public service building control surveyors to cover all costs associated with the BSCF validation of competence up to the revalidation assessment in year 4.

The HSE/BSR has actively supported the ISO 17024 Building Safety Competence Foundation route as an independent, unbiased, and impartial assessment of an individuals’ skills, knowledge, ethics and behaviours, designed to hold up to scrutiny from all including service users, senior managers and insurers. 

Other organisations are in the process of creating methods of competence assessment and we very much welcome the addition of other similarly robust routes to validation. It is essential that the building control profession and the wider industry are able to demonstrate a step-change in culture and competence to regain public trust and confidence.

Publication of the BICoF has provided us with certainty and clarity to move forward at pace. 

The 3 BSCF classes, Domestic, General and Specialist/Complex align with the technical classes announced by the BSR. 

LABC will continue to help and support all our members through this transition to enable them to be part of the new registered profession.