Consortium Agreement - Peer Group Reviews

Brief Introduction

On 1 May 2005 the Building (Scotland) Act 2003 introduced a reformed building standards system in Scotland with the 32 local authorities as the sole verifiers for their geographical areas.

At the time of the introduction of the new Act and to assist in the transition to the new system, a Direction, in terms of the Act, was issued to allow all Scottish Local Authorities to act as verifiers in respect of buildings where they have an interest.

This means that a local authority as a verifier is responsible for issuing Building Warrants for building work that is undertaking as a local authority, ie self-verification.

As a result of possible conflict of interest in March 2007, the Scottish Ministers confirmed that the Direction would not be extended when it expired.

To assist in the response to this situation the formation of a Consortium of Local Authorities for carrying out Peer Group Reviews was developed following discussion between the Councils, the Scottish Minister responsible for Building Standards, the Scottish Association of Building Standards Managers and the Scottish Building Standards, Directorate of the Built Environment, Scottish Government (formerly the Scottish Building Standards Agency).

This lead to the creation of a Consortium Agreement with the purpose of providing the Scottish Ministers with an assurance of transparency and third party checking to enable them to extend the permission for self-verification of the Local Authorities. This is achieved by bringing together a number of verifiers to carry out Peer Group Reviews.

The City of Edinburgh Council is part of the Edinburgh, Lothians, Borders & Fife Consortium and a copy of the agreement is available here.