Ms Sarah Neary:

As regards inspections, an important part of the BCAR system is that time is put in upfront by the design certifier to design the building in accordance with building regulations. That means it has been thought about it before people go on site and they have something they know is going to work and that has been certified by a competent person. When people move on to the construction phase, a risk assessment is done to create a sample inspection plan, which is the plan of when the building is going to be inspected. Those inspections have to be carried out by a competent person. The system involves a pushed approach to inspections at the most critical times.

The second level is the State layer, whereby building control people go out and do inspections. I will not go into the detail now but there is a lot of work going on in terms of ensuring we are doing risk-based inspections through building control. Obviously works such as this would feature on the risk scale and be considered complex, and we would, therefore, expect that such developments would be inspected by the local authority.