Enhancing digital building control across the UK

Local authorities play a crucial role in ensuring building safety during development projects. As part of a multi-disciplinary team from 3 local councils, we helped identify the barriers affecting building control services.

Background

Wide-ranging regulations cover how buildings are constructed and altered, to meet standards of safety, health, welfare, convenience and sustainability. Local authorities and privately approved inspectors ensure compliance with these building regulations, covering design, construction methods, materials and safety measures. This involves inspecting plans, issuing approvals, conducting site inspections and issuing completion certificates.

To support this complex process, both local authorities and the private sector provide a range of digital building control services. These services include checking and storing documentation and booking inspection visits.

Brief

As local authorities providing building control services, the councils of Lambeth, Bath & North East Somerset and Bracknell Forest collectively identified several issues they wanted to investigate further. These included:

• the inefficient back-office systems for local authority staff
• workload management that was unclear to its users
• a range of challenges in adapting to regulatory changes
• poor quality of data and processes exacerbating these issues

To address these challenges, with funding from Local Digital, the 3 councils initiated a discovery to validate their assumptions nationwide and identify other barriers affecting building control services for local authorities.

The councils formed a multidisciplinary team, including specialists in service design, data analysis and subject-matter experts in building control. Our role in the team was to better understand users and their needs.

An example of a remote user research session, understanding users challenges with existing systems and processes

What we did

Initially, we helped define key questions to find out:

• the various users involved in the end-to-end building control service
• how many councils manage separate planning and inspection functions
• what steps are involved in obtaining Completion Certificates

We engaged a representative sample of building control service users from a broad range of local authorities, encompassing various roles involved in service delivery. Methods included:

• mapping service offerings and key user journeys across building control to understand the holistic service process
• extensively interviewing building control officers and customers of partner councils to capture detailed insights, pain points and opportunities
• supporting the team in writing and analysing a survey of building control officers nationwide to gain a broader perspective and validate initial assumptions
• collaboratively analysing research findings to build a comprehensive understanding across the project team
• holding a recommendations workshops with the leading councils to review findings and generate options for solving the issues identified

The team analysing findings from user research in a collaborative workshop

Challenges

Building control involves a large, complex process with interconnected products and services, including various digital planning services, registers and databases. Engaging with all relevant teams and organizations was crucial to understanding their pain points and opportunities.

There are also over 300 local authorities in the UK, all serving different demographics, with different systems and roles supporting building control. We therefore needed to ensure our research was comprehensive and representative of the whole sector, and not biased by any potential nuances of the local authorities we were working with. To ensure this we:

• mapped out which types of users and stakeholders should be prioritised to best inform the project
• engaged a broad, representative sample of users in user interviews, from across the country
• worked with the team to analyse the survey results and validate our high-level themes at a much broader scale than we could manage with user research interviews

Lastly, while the cross-authority team possessed expertise in building control, for some this was their first digital discovery. Alongside user research, we provided upskilling and coaching in user-centred and agile methodologies, introducing project planning sessions to enhance team communication, transparency and alignment.

Results

Our work provided the team with a robust understanding of building control service users across the UK, answering and validating research questions.

Our research identified:

• 6 common user groups across local authority building control services, with detailed personas outlining their goals, needs, information sources and pain points
• 12 high-level pain points of the building control process, such as inefficient manual processing and fragmented communication with customers
• 80 user needs across 11 themes, including applications, inspections and reporting, informing future service delivery
• document management and search improvements as critical interventions
• the need to consider apathy and change management in system and process updates

Working collaboratively with stakeholders we defined key areas for improvement. These were to:

• reduce invalid applications by improving the information provided to customers when they submit building control applications
• enhance customer experience by improving existing workflows to ensure a more positive experience for applicants
• retain customers by providing a joined up service so they use local authority building control, which would also increase revenue to councils

Our validated findings allowed the team to confidently recommend that councils explore developing an open-source digital service. This service would improve customer-facing and Building Control staff operations, while increasing transparency and empowerment for customers.

Feedback

“You’ve been brilliant. All the work that you’ve done has been fantastic!” Catherine Neal, Head of Infrastructure, Operations & Innovation, London Borough of Lambeth

“[Previous research] was nothing like the quality of your work!” Nitesh Pankhania, Head of Building Control, London Borough of Lambeth

Future

The project has progressed into an alpha phase to enhance both customer-facing and internal staffing tools for efficiency, effectiveness and user-friendliness. Our identified personas, user needs and pain points have provided a solid foundation for exploring new solutions that truly meet user needs.

We provided further recommendations on structuring, resourcing and planning the alpha phase to ensure robust yet rapid concept development of solutions that can be reused across all local authorities.