Building control (guarantee)?

[gemshan1]

Hi guys, if structural building work has been passed by building control but later fails, do I have a guarantee from builder or building control to have it put right.?

 

[mrrusty]

no

 

[^woody^]

No guarantee or even liability from council building control. May be able to sue private inspector in negligence.

Your builder would normally provide some sort of guarantee under contract. And likewise the designer.

It all depends what has gone wrong and how liability can be apportioned or proved.

 

[mrrusty]

What @^woody^ says is spot on. There is no connection between a completion certificate and any sort of guarantee, You have to start at the beginning and decide who has contractual liability. If there was a 3rd party structural engineer involved, who employed them? you? the builder?

Did the builder have any design responsibility/liability? or was it just a build to spec? Is the failure due to poor workmanship? or poor design? Until you work out the answers to these questions you won't know who to go after.

Unless the failure is massive, or someone holds their hand up and admits fault, it may well be that pragmatically there is less time, hassle and money involved in just fixing the fault and getting on with life. We need more info.

 

[jeds]

When was this work carried out? Standard contract liability is 6 years. You may have a common law remedy for a latent defect, but this becomes more and more vague and difficult to pursue with the passing of time. This would be on the builder so depends if they still exist or are traceable, who instructed who to do what, who was responsible for the original structural design and what documentation you have, plus a number of etcs? As above, building control is a non-starter.

 

[^woody^]

I suspect the OPs defects are patent, not latent.