Building control asked for evidence you don't have

It's a common moment of dread. A building control inspector, sometimes a different one to who visited before, asks to see evidence that a particular stage was completed correctly. Insulation continuity at a junction. Steel beam padstones. A cavity tray above a lintel. If it's covered up and there's no photo, you're now trying to prove something happened using memory and reputation, neither of which building control can accept as evidence.

What happens next depends on how reasonable the inspector is and how much trust you've built up with them, which is not a position you want to be relying on. In the more difficult cases, they'll ask for intrusive investigation, opening up finished work to check it, at your cost and on your programme. In milder cases, they'll accept a written statement from the contractor, but that carries far less weight than a dated photo and won't always be enough to satisfy them, especially on anything load-bearing or related to fire and structural safety.

The regulations changed the stakes on this too. Under the Building Safety Act's golden thread requirements, which apply in full force to higher-risk buildings but are increasingly expected as good practice across residential work generally, there's a growing assumption that key stages of construction are documented as they happen, not reconstructed afterwards. Building control officers who've seen a few insurance claims or disputes go badly are asking for this evidence more often, not less.

The fix is simple and doesn't add meaningful time to a job. Before anything gets covered, boxed in, or built over, a photo goes in the record: DPC before the brickwork continues, insulation before the plasterboard, steelwork before it's cased. It takes seconds on a phone that's already in someone's pocket. The difference between having that photo and not having it is the difference between a two-minute conversation with an inspector and a hole cut in a finished wall.

We built the photo and document features in Sitestack around exactly this problem, tagging photos to the stage and location of a job so that when someone asks six months later, the evidence is one search away rather than a scroll through someone's camera roll.