The Intermediary – September 2025 - Flipbook - Page 53
RESIDENTIAL
Opinion
launched consultations on both an
updated Home Survey Standard and
a potential home survey regulation
scheme. These reviews seek clearer
definitions of survey levels, beer
integration of sustainability, and
digital-first reporting – all directly
aligned with the evidence boleneck
being faced within the surveyor sector.
The regulatory logjam
The pressures of compliance are
tangible. The Building Safety
Regulator, tasked with enforcing postGrenfell reforms, is overwhelmed.
Of the 2,108 Gateway applications
submied between October 2023 and
March 2025, only 338 were approved –
a success rate of just 16%. The average
turnaround time has ballooned to 25
weeks, with some cases dragging on
for over eight months.
This boleneck is not just a
bureaucratic inconvenience; it’s a
tangible barrier to progress. London’s
Q1 2025 housebuilding figures, the
lowest in 16 years, tell a sobering story
of just 1,210 starts – a fraction of the
proposed annual goal of 88,000. When
approval workflows slow down, the
housing crisis deepens, costs escalate,
and investor confidence erodes.
The Construction Skills Network
projects that the UK will need more
than 225,000 additional workers
across the built environment by
2027 (1,500 will be surveyors – CITB
Breakdown), underlining that this is
not just a planning or regulatory issue
but a systemic capacity challenge.
but it would drastically cut down on
the time spent repackaging reports
for compliance purposes, time that
could be spent doing more valueadded work.
At Property Inspect, we see this
shi already underway. Surveyors
who work with structured metadata,
PAS-aligned templates, and integrated
capture tools are delivering evidence,
not just reports. These professionals
aren’t just surveying; they’re building
trust, compliance, and momentum.
Evidence-ready inspections
Reframing capacity
Here’s where we need to flip the
script. The fastest way to increase
surveying capacity isn’t just training
more professionals – a long-term,
expensive process. It’s ensuring
that the professionals we do have
are empowered to produce Golden
Thread-compliant, submission-ready
outputs from the moment they leave
the site.
Imagine a world where inspections
are templated, photographic evidence
is geolocated, material data is tagged
at source, and reporting tools are
integrated across disciplines.
Not only would this reduce the
risk of human error and revisits,
The term ‘surveying capacity’ needs
redefining. It’s no longer just about
how many surveyors we have. It’s
about the volume of compliant,
decision-ready information those
professionals can produce. Capacity,
in this sense, is a function of
enablement.
It’s time for the industry to stop
treating compliance as a bolton and start seeing it as built-in.
That means investing in digital
workflows, standardising inspection
methodologies, and embedding data
integrity at the point of capture.
We need to empower our existing
workforce with tools that scale
their expertise and free them from
repetitive, manual admin tasks.
The question isn’t whether we have
enough surveyors. It’s whether those
surveyors are equipped to deliver
evidence at scale.
Until we close that gap, the
profession will keep misdiagnosing a
skills crisis, when what we really face
is an evidence crisis. ●
