Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the (a) adequacy and (b) effectiveness of local authorities' powers to prevent underqualified builders from constructing developments once planning permission has been granted.

The responsibility for ensuring compliance with the Building Regulations rests with the people carrying out the work. The building control body will inspect building work on site at appropriate stages. The local authority has the power, under Section 36 of the Building Act, to take enforcement action against non-compliant work.

The Building Safety Bill includes a power to make Regulations regarding the competence of anyone carrying out design or building work. We intend, through Regulations, to require that individuals and the people they employ are competent for their roles. To support these legal requirements, we are working with the industry and the British Standards Institution (BSI) to develop an Overarching Competence Framework Standard that can be adapted for different sectors to produce sector-specific competence frameworks.