In July the Government introduced its Building Safety Bill and it has now begun its passage through Parliament.

While the majority of the Bill is focused on setting out a new pathway for how residential buildings should be constructed and maintained, the Bill also contains some changes to ARB’s role. We know every architect is passionate about public safety and we’re committed to working with the sector to ensure we contribute to a built environment where people are safe and can live well; this Bill would help us to do that.

The changes the Bill would make to our role are set out below; further information is available on our website here. Any architects who want to be involved in how we adopt these new roles can join our Architects Engagement Group to stay informed. You can find more about this here.

Continuing professional development

The Bill paves the way for new powers to let ARB monitor the continuing professional development architects undertake throughout their careers.

We want to work with architects as we design the new scheme. We’ll make sure it can be tailored by each architect to their own practice and needs, so that it supports them to be the best they can in the areas that matter most to their work. Soon we’ll be sharing our early ideas about the scheme and inviting architects’ views on how to make it work.

Listing of disciplinary orders

Another change is that we would in future publicly list disciplinary orders against a registered architect. This would improve transparency, promote public confidence in the profession, and may deter poor professional conduct or incompetence. We’ll work with the Government and consult the profession to determine the length of time a disciplinary order would be listed on the Register. We expect that the time the order is listed will take into account its severity.

Fees

The Bill provides a power for the Government to extend the provisions for us to charge for additional regulatory services. This change will help to ensure we have the resources we need to deliver any additional services, for example the implementation of new routes to the Register for architects who qualified outside of the UK.

Fees would be designed to recover full costs and not intended to make a profit. This change will also help to limit increases in the annual retention fee because those services will be paid for separately by those who use them. Further information will be shared once the Government implements any new charging regime in secondary legislation in the future.