, Building
A groundworker in Wakefield digs a foundation trench on a Thursday, the concrete lorry is booked for Friday morning, and nobody has rung building control. The builder decides the trench is obviously deep enough, the concrete goes in, and the job moves on.
Eleven years later the owner tries to sell. The buyer's solicitor asks for the completion certificate. There isn't one. The sale stalls while an indemnity policy is argued over, and the surveyor wants the foundations opened up, which nobody will pay for.
That is what the inspection regime is actually for. Not the day it happens, but the decade afterwards.
Planning permission and building control are different questions
They get conflated constantly, and getting one does not get you the other.
Planning permission is about whether the thing should exist: its use, its appearance, its effect on neighbours and the area. It is administered by the local planning authority under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and its successors.
Building control is about whether the thing is built properly: structure, fire safety, ventilation, drainage, energy efficiency, access, sound. It runs under the Building Act 1984 and the Building Regulations 2010, with the technical guidance in the Approved Documents, lettered A to S. Approved Document A is structure, B is fire safety, F is ventilation, L is conservation of fuel and power, and so on. The Approved Documents are guidance, not law: you can comply another way, but then you have to demonstrate that you have.
Plenty of work is permitted development for planning and still fully subject to building control. A rear extension, a loft conversion, a new boiler, replacement windows, a structural opening, a new circuit in a kitchen. Assuming that "no planning needed" means "nothing needed" is how unauthorised work happens.
Full plans or a building notice, and the answer is usually full plans
There are two routes to approval for most work.
A full plans application means you submit drawings, structural calculations and specifications before you start. The building control body checks them against the regulations and issues a decision. You get, in effect, a written opinion that the design complies before you have bought anything.
A building notice is a short notification that you intend to start work, with no detailed drawings. It is quicker to lodge and it is only available for certain work: it cannot be used where the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applies to the building, and it cannot be used for building over or near a public sewer, or for work on a building fronting a private street.
The building notice looks attractive and is usually the wrong choice on anything structural. With no approved plans, every judgement is made on site, at the moment the inspector sees it, with materials already bought. Full plans means the arguments happen on paper, when changing your mind costs a drawing revision rather than a wall.
You also choose who does the checking: the local authority, or a private sector body. Since 1 October 2023 the private route in England is a registered building control approver, the term that replaced approved inspector under the Building Safety Act 2022, and individual building inspectors must themselves be registered with the Building Safety Regulator. Higher-risk buildings, broadly those at least 18m tall or with at least seven storeys plus other criteria, go through the Building Safety Regulator's gateway process instead and are a different proposition entirely. This part of the system has changed recently and is still settling, so check the current position before you rely on any summary of it.
The inspections are yours to book, and two of them are unforgiving
Building control does not watch your programme. You notify them at set points, and the notice periods in the Building Regulations 2010 are short but real: broadly two days' notice before you start, at least one day's notice before covering up foundation excavations, foundations, damp proof course or concrete over a site, and notice within five days of completion. Drains have to be tested before and after backfilling.
The usual sequence on a domestic job is commencement, foundation excavation, foundation concrete, oversite and damp proof course, drainage before covering, drainage test, insulation and structure before plastering, and completion.
Two of those are unforgiving because they are the ones that get covered. Foundations and drainage. Everything else can be exposed again at moderate cost. A foundation that was never inspected can only be proved by digging a trial hole, and a drain that was never tested is a matter of opinion until it fails.
If work has already been covered, or was done years ago without approval, the route back is a regularisation application to the local authority. It costs more than doing it properly, it usually involves opening something up, and it produces a regularisation certificate rather than a completion certificate. A regularisation certificate is worth having and is not the same document.
Some work can be self-certified by a registered installer under a competent person scheme: Gas Safe for gas appliances, a scheme member for electrical work under Part P, FENSA or Certass for replacement windows. The installer notifies the local authority and the owner gets a certificate. This is genuinely simpler, and it only covers the specific work in the scheme.
The certificate is the part the buyer's solicitor cares about
At the end, if the work complies, you get a completion certificate from the local authority or a final certificate from a registered building control approver. That document is what appears in a conveyancing pack in fifteen years' time.
Its absence is not a small administrative gap. The local authority has enforcement powers under the Building Act 1984, including requiring work to be altered or removed, and the time limit for prosecuting building regulations offences was extended by the Building Safety Act 2022, taking effect in 2023, from the old two years to ten. Separately, the Defective Premises Act 1972 limitation period was extended by the same Act to 30 years for claims about works completed before the Act came into force and 15 years afterwards. The long tail on construction liability is considerably longer than it used to be.
For a builder, the practical discipline is unglamorous. Put the notification dates in the programme, not in your head. Photograph every element before it is covered, with a tape in shot and a date. Give the client the certificate, in writing, along with the as-built information. The photographs cost nothing and have settled a great many arguments.
Where this shows up in the game
Construction and housebuilding arrive in Business Baron with the Property & Construction Track, an add-on to the full game. Consents come from bodies with their own timetables, and a job that waits for one is a job paying costs without earning. A missing certificate is the kind of problem that outlives the site.